Haas F1 team driver Nikita Mazepin's future in the sport is uncertain due to sanctions being imposed on his native country of Russia.
Follow Us
Going into the 2022 Formula 1 season, there are plenty of questions around the Haas F1 team and their driver line-up. And this is entirely due to circumstances beyond the team’s control.
The team were set to race with 2021 drivers Mick Schumacher and Nikita Mazepin for the 2022 season. However, there are question marks surrounding the future of the latter.
Mazepin is a Russian citizen, and would require a visa for racing around the world as part of the F1 series. However, current sanctions on Russia due to the Ukraine invasion means Russian nationals will find it harder to get visas.
Naturally, this has led to speculation over who might potentially get the Haas seat if Mazepin were to drop out.
According to team principal Gunther Steiner, the first call would go to reserve driver Pietro Fittipaldi.
“If Nikita couldn’t drive for one or another reason, the first call would go to Pietro,” Steiner said to Bob Varsha for Speed City Broadcasting.
“Obviously, he [has been] with us for a few years, and then we would see what we do next. But I mean Pietro is always around with us for a reason.
“The last years, we needed a reserve driver, having COVID around, so he is always around. He knows the team, he knows the car to jump in for one day to the other.
“There is nobody better than Pietro around at the moment.”
Pietro, the grandson of two-time world champion Emerson Fittipaldi, is no stranger to F1; he made his debut at the 2020 Sakhir GP, standing in for the injured Romain Grosjean.
He also drove at the 2020’s season-ending Abu Dhabi GP, before remaining with the team through 2021 as their reserve driver.
But aside from off-track issues, Haas have been facing issues on the track too. F1’s three-day testing at Barcelona saw the American team encounter a number of issues that severely limited their running times.
As a result, Steiner can only hope the team don’t encounter any major issues in the official pre-season testing at Bahrain.
“Today we could unfortunately only do nine laps. We had an issue with the oil system in the engine. There was a leak that we couldn’t sort over the day, so we didn’t do a lot of running.
Also read: Red Bull have ‘good baseline’, says Sergio Perez after final day of testing
“About the rest of the test, the first day was a little bit clumsy, I would say, but we learned enough that on the second day we were well prepared.
“The second day was actually pretty good, we learned a lot. If you think, we had three days of testing but really we only managed one.
“I think we made good progress. Now we have to get prepared for Bahrain. We have information, we know what to do and we will get it done.
“Hopefully, in Bahrain, we don’t have any gremlins.”
