Angry Mazepin accuses Schumacher of breaking F1 team protocol in Q1

The pair’s justling for track position at the final couple of corners blocked the track, impeding Aston Martin’s Sebastian Vettel, who was unable to progress from Q1.

Mazepin left the pit lane ahead of Schumacher but then was overtaken by his teammate later in the lap.

The Russian believes Schumacher broke protocol as like with many teams up and down the pit lane, it alternates each weekend as to which drivers leaves the garage first in qualifying.

Giving his thoughts on the incident, Mazepin said: “I’m really annoyed to be honest because it should have not been that difficult with traffic as rules within an F1 team one weekend you are the first car next weekend you are the second car.

“This weekend was my turn to be the first car and I’ve once in Imola overtaken the first car when I was second and I got a bollocking from the team, and now this has happened to me the second team, he overtakes me and bumps me into the traffic and fucks my last attempt in quali on purpose, so I’m not happy because if you do it once and he didn’t know about it fine, but twice that’s deliberate, and I don’t like it when there’s tension, it shouldn’t be like that.”

Giving his side of the story, Schumacher revealed that he had got permission from the team to overtake Mazepin.

“We spoke with the team about it, I went through the pit lane, my tyres were cooling down, so usually what I do is do faster out-lap,” Schumacher explained. “In that case, Nikita was doing a slow out-lap so I requested to overtake which I got the OK to do so, which I did. Early enough.

“I had Lando as well between us so I don’t really understand the confusion which happened in the last corner. Obviously, that messed up a few things for everybody.”

The 2020 F2 champion says he has apologised to Vettel, who has been a good friend and mentor to him since entering the sport at the start of the year.

“Obviously, I just said sorry,” he added. “I hope he knows that he’s the last person that I want to be in the way of. Unfortunate.”