Nizer

Vettel feeling the heat?

https://www.autoblog.com/2019/04/02/...-ferrari-test/

StoogeMoe

He might be!

He'll go back to Red Bull and replace Gasley.

StoogeMoe

Or he'll get demoted to the junior team Alpha Romeo and be Kimi's teammate again.

breljohn

I would take Mick's results with a grain of salt.
Ferrari might have given him a really fast car for marketing purpose.
As you know you can change engine modes, fuel levels an put on new tires to help your driver.

That being said, a Leclerc-Schumi line up would be amazing

Veloce Raptor

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree

DTMiller

Yeah, they gave him a set of C5 tires; the softest tires available for the race was the C3 compound and his best time was 1:29.976, which would not have gotten him into Q2. Obviously it's hard to know about fuel loads and weather comparisons, or I'm too lazy to figure them out, but he didn't exactly set the new track record with the advantage of better tires than anyone else.

Great to see him out there in a car, he looked good in the F2 race.

multi21

In looking at the timing board, I was having flashbacks with “Schumacher, Verstappen and Fittipaldi” setting times!! LOL 😂

wildcat077

Looking at his results in F2 , he doesn't come close to what Lando Norris and George Russell achieved before making the jump to F1 ...
What DT mentions about tire choices and engine mode makes a lot of sense, as to the average person they would think he can keep up with the current crop of drivers!
Although i can see him replacing Giovinnazi next season at Alfa

Look at Stroll ... daddy will have to buy him an even better team ... oh wait , did i just say that ???

multi21

Schumacher finished 6th fastest today in the Alfa Romeo which is pretty much expected as compared to being in the faster Ferrari yesterday

breljohn

Might be premature to judge his F2 results. He's done one race...

zzyzx

Not to take anything away from these really young guys like Leclerc--his talent is hugely impressive--but I do have to wonder whether his lap times and race results would have been possible without many hours of simulator time and access to data. Thirty years ago a young, inexperienced driver would have had a much, much steeper learning curve.

The other day I was listening to a guy talking about how back in the 70s he overheard Jackie Stewart and his teammate Francoise Cevert debating about what gear to use in a series of corners. It's funny how quaint that sounds today.

multi21

Probably not, but it's a whole new world. If you look at the average age of the grid, it's gone way down probably because it's infinitely much cheaper to run a simulator than an actual car and everything that goes along with it. Ultimately though, there's something to be said about experience. Just looking at some of the elder statesmen on the grid such as Kimi, Lewis, Vettel and more recently Alonso -- they seem to be the last generation of drivers that came from an era of no simulators and seem to have lasting power in F1.

LuigiVampa

This.

and this.

When you factor all these items in he might really be more than a second or two off the pace and that would be no story at all.

I hope he is a phenom as the Schumacher name back in F1 would be great for the sport.

StoogeMoe

Being the son of the legendary Michael Schumacher, everything he does is going to be studied under a microscope. And I mean everything. The poor kid is going to be under intense pressure every time he steps into a car. I hope he does really well and extends legendary status for another generation. Kind of reminds me of what Michael Andretti had to go through.

gbuff

Yeah, but Andretti set himself up to fail in F1. He wouldn't stay overseas with the team, opting to fly home at every opportunity, and he didn't keep himself in the shape you need to be in to be the best in F1. His results showed.

Gary