Schumacher: If there are no options in F1, WEC is a good plan B

Mick Schumacher has never made a secret of his desire to return to Formula 1 as soon as possible, but for now he is driving for the Alpine factory team in the World Endurance Championship and believes he will gain useful professional experience this year.

“It’s a good championship and it was a good plan B for me,” Mick told RacingNews365. – When there are no options in Formula 1, this is a good alternative. I have never hidden that my goal is to return to Formula 1, and I will continue to work in this direction.

But at the same time you have to keep your finger on the pulse and keep a good race form, and that’s what I do in the WEC. Unfortunately, we can’t boast good results yet. Our speed is always good, but we’ve never been able to make a good result out of it.

Sometimes we had bad luck, like in Qatar when the race was stopped by red flags, and in Spa and Imola difficulties were accompanied by incidents. Unfortunately both team cars retired at Le Mans (due to engine problems), which made the start of the season not easy.

Although Mick has not competed in endurance racing before, he is helped to master the new discipline by his experienced teammates, with whom he drives the A424 hypercar: Nicolas Lapierre and Mathieu Vaxivière, who can already be considered WEC veterans. However, they are at least the same breed, albeit with their own characteristics.

“We can say that everything happens very naturally, because we always overtake someone,” explains the son of the seven-time world champion. – It is more difficult to overtake correctly, because sometimes you have to sacrifice a specific corner to get ahead of someone as quickly as possible.

In that respect, I am already acting better and I can already predict how the riders in front of me will behave, so that everything is accompanied by minimal loss of time.

I can learn a lot from my teammates, I try to adopt their approach on certain things that are specific to endurance racing. I feel how useful it is because everything I can learn from them helps me to improve my training and become a faster rider. Maybe in the future this will be my advantage over someone who doesn’t have such experience.

The tooling we use in WEC is basically the same as in Formula 1. I think it also helps that in the past I have driven powerful cars with a lot of downforce. I can adapt more easily to the A424, which is a bit slower and heavier and therefore behaves lazier on the track. And if she is too lazy, then I can help the team by giving her advice, for example: “At the moment it is not so important to increase the speed on the uneven parts of the track, but it is much more important to go faster in the corners.”

We all have our own approach and I think the experience we have gained in other racing categories allows us to work effectively in general.”

Last weekend, the 6 Hours of Sao Paulo race took place in Brazil, where Mick Schumacher, together with his teammates on the Alpine hypercar #36, took 10th place and opened the score for the first time. The next race will take place on September 1st in the USA, at the Texas Motor Speedway in Austin.