Nikita Mazepin sings a song sung in blue about his current game with the Haas F1 team

Nikita Mazepin sounds like a driver who thinks the Formula 1 world, maybe even his own team, is after him.

The driver’s latest claim in the first year is that his Haas F1 car is actually heavier than that of his teammate and rookie colleague Mick Schumacher. Mazepin feels like the deck at Haas is kind of stacked against him.

Incidentally, Schumacher beat Mazepin in seven of eight races of the season. Nobody finished better than 13th.

“I think I did a very good opening lap, I was happy with the positioning, I prepared very well to know where a lot of cars might be and how to get past them,” said Mazepin after the race in last week Austria. “But when you have a lot of laps and long straights and you have a very heavy car compared to the other cars in our team, it’s very difficult to stay in front, so I’m not happy.

Nikita Mazepin will meet the media virtually from Austria on Thursday.

Dan IstitenGetty Images

“But I’m just waiting for a new one to really have a chance, because at the moment I’m just a sitting duck and I do my best at the beginning and then I’m just a carrot that has to be caught and unfortunately I was caught that so it is. “

Haas F1 boss Günther Steiner confirmed that Mazepin drove a heavier car than his teammate. Steiner told European media company The Race that the weight difference “slows him down, but it’s not much. I don’t want to go into the specific weight difference, it’s not very (big). “

Mazepin doesn’t see things like that.

“The commentary perspective you get from the pit wall is likely very different from driving the car for 73 laps,” Mazepin said during a media video conference Thursday from the location of the F1 Grand Prix of Austria this weekend. “So I think everyone has the right to think and they might be right, but I’m pretty sure that it has a pretty big impact because it balances the weight distribution and that balances out the setup that you put in the car .

“There are some factors when you look at it from a mechanical point of view. But I would say by and large it’s not unacceptable. It just makes my life a little bit more difficult, but I have a very good” team of engineers who help me to help my rookie understand how it works better. “

Nikita Mazepin’s best F1 result this season was 14th in France.

Photo onlyGetty Images

Mazepin has yet to score a point in his short F1 career. His best result was 14th place in Azerbaijan. He finished 19th or 20th in four of the eight races, which has resulted in seeing a lot of blue – blue flags are waved by officials instructing him to let faster cars pass.

“I really liked our blue color ahead of this F1 season,” said Mazepin. “I wear blue (Haas team colors) almost every day of my life, as you can see. But in the race, if you’re just getting caught by a car and slowing down and walking into the marbles and then trying and re-pacing start – which is most of the time and you get caught again – you kind of fall into this awful place.

“The worst thing is when an engineer tells you that five cars are within 2 seconds of each other – all (will) bring out blues and you have to slow down. That happened last weekend I unfortunately. And I think with a slight increase in pace we could gain a lot of overall race time because we would have less blues, but it didn’t work out last week. Sometimes races are what they are. “

Mazepin’s song sung in blue contains a unique personal F1 record this season.

“My personal record is 35 blue flags in Monaco, which is almost double the grid of all starters,” he said. “Losing as little time as possible on (blue flag) is definitely a challenge, but I think with the amount of training we’ve got this year, I’ll probably be good at it very soon.”

And yes, he’s still called the Maze Spin by some on social media for his spins early in the season.

“Imagine if I didn’t shoot a couple of times in Bahrain, the maze spin wouldn’t be born,” he said. “I think the number of people who are likely to have smiles on their faces is a pretty large amount, and I don’t want these people to have a miserable day.”

This content is imported from Twitter. You may find the same content in a different format or more information on their website.

This content is created and maintained by a third party and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may find more information on this and similar content at piano.io