“Does he want to kill us?” Schumacher furious with Mazepin after near-miss

The German pipped Mazepin by just seven hundredths of a second in a drag race to the finish line on the final lap of a dramatic race in Baku to snatch 13th place for Haas, marking the team’s best result of 2021.

But as Schumacher moved out of Mazepin’s slipstream to make his overtake, the Russian jinked to the right and squeezed Schumacher towards the wall while both drivers were running flat-out.

Schumacher was able to avoid contact and got the move completed but was angered by Mazepin’s actions.

“What the fuck was that, honestly! Seriously, does he want to kill us?” Schumacher said over team radio at the chequered flag.

Schumacher’s race engineer, Gary Gannon, responded: “Understood Mick, understood.”

After the race, Mazepin admitted he was frustrated to have lost the position to Schumacher and revealed he had run out of battery deployment. 

“The main is that I’m a little bit upset about losing the position to my teammate on the main pit straight,” he said. “I ran out of battery there so I was a bit of a sitting passenger.

“It was nice number for the team, but obviously some unexpected situations has happened with the other drivers which enabled us to get that position. But overall, it’s quite positive.

“The race itself was not bad,” he added. “Very annoying because certain things made us fall backwards.

“The pace was there but we were experimenting with something because I had to manage the brakes from the beginning because they were overheating.

“And then I had to change my brake bias and because of the change I then was very prone to locking and I almost drove into a wall which lost me a lot of time. But so many times the race was stopped and then come to life again.”