Sebastian Vettel offered Mick Schumacher a clever piece of advice to help the Haas rookie solve a seat issue in his VF-21.
Schumacher has revealed that he has been "sitting in a crooked position" in his Haas car, and although the issue isn't impacted his driving, the young German just feels the need to optimize his comfort in the cockpit.
The 22-year-old's "crooked seat" plight came to light after last weekend's French Grand Prix, when a video emerged showing Schumacher in Parc Fermé after the race talking to Vettel, and his mentor than peering into the Haas cockpit to have a look at the seat's position.
"Basically, I have been sitting in a crooked position since the beginning of the season just because the seat is too central but [my back is] not straight," said Schumacher in Thursday's media conference in Austria, sitting alongside Vettel.
"We’ve actually been talking about it before and so we, or I, took that opportunity to show to him, and yes, just spoke about the seat."
Just @SchumacherMick asking his mentor to check out his car 🥺#FrenchGP 🇫🇷 #F1 pic.twitter.com/78Q52O93zG
— Formula 1 (@F1) June 20, 2021
Vettel had a rather drastic suggestion for solving the problem, that Schumacher fortunately did not follow.
"He gave my mum a tip of maybe breaking it so I would get a new one sooner! But it didn’t happen in the end, so I have still in the same seat for now," he joked.
A mischievous Vettel admitted that it had perhaps not been the best advice to follow.
"It would’ve been in difficult to get a new one in a week, so don’t always follow the advice I give!" he quipped.
"The key is very simple – I spent so many years racing and we spoke about the seat during the last week and there’s always small things you can improve or look at, so I wanted to have a looked and we had a look."
Schumacher admitted that his seat issue was very much a "secondary concern".
"It’s not as bad as maybe some might think. It’s a small offset," he added. "It’s something that I have been used to in junior categories. And to be fair, doesn’t harm me in any way while driving. It is something that for us is a secondary concern right now.
"For me, or us, it’s mostly about trying to get everything ready for the weekend and being prepared on that level and maybe setting our focus on something else instead of wasting it on something that is maybe not affecting me right now.
"But as I said, it’s something that is in plan and for sure after the summer break we’ll come back with something that is a bit more [comfortable].
"But we’ve been working on it in the beginning of the season quite a lot. We got to something that waws comfortable enough for me to keep going, so we just left it with that."
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