Mick Schumacher follows in Dad’s sports car footsteps

Almost 33 years ago, a young Michael Schumacher found himself indignantly stranded just outside the Silverstone pit exit when his Mercedes C11 Group C car’s gear linkage crumbled during qualifying for the British Empire Trophy, as the ex-WEC round was known then.

After the Silver Arrows junior driver’s mechanics came to his rescue – legging it down the pitlane to fix the car – the incident was deemed ‘outside assistance’ and the German hotshot was promptly excluded from the event, along with his Le Mans-winning team-mate Jochen Mass.

Over three decades later, his son Mick is now getting to grips with what he calls “the basics” of a fast and furious, 40-car strong sports car field as he prepares to make his World Endurance Championship debut this weekend for Alpine in Qatar.

Father and son have an uncanny reverse symmetry to their careers – while Michael had a couple of years of sports car appearances before famously launching into F1, son Mick is now embarking on an endurance racing journey after a couple of years in the grand prix world

Speaking to Motor Sport, the former F2 and F3 champion is clearly keen to put recent unsatisfying years behind him when he was either stuck at the back of the F1 grid with Haas or on the bench as a reserve driver for Mercedes – and describes how glad he is to be back behind the wheel.

“It’s amazing,” he enthuses. “It was my first season [in 2023] not racing in over 15 years, so it felt quite weird – and I didn’t like it.

“So I’m happy that I’m back in the racing seat. Also, I feel like that working aspect of trying to prove yourself, trying to get after it, is something so special and unique to sports in general.

“And if you just sit on the bench, you don’t really get to do that.

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“I think it’s definitely a start of something, which hopefully is a good season, a good project. Who knows what the future holds?”

2 Mick Schumacher ALpine WEC Qatar 2024
It’s busy out there – negotiating the congested field takes some getting used to

DPPI

With limited testing in WEC, over the course of the Prologue and practice sessions Schumacher has just been trying to acclimatise to what is a congested Losail track at the best of times; a tight circuit originally designed for MotoGP bikes.

“It’s been my first experience with every car on track,” he says, slightly wide-eyed. “I think it was good to have that with the GT cars, and see how [a number of] Hypercars behave on track – it’s out of the ordinary to me [after] racing in open wheels.