Mick Schumacher cuts ties with Ferrari

Mick Schumacher has cut ties with Ferrari after deciding he will become a free agent to look for a drive for 2023 rather than wait for something in the Scuderia’s sphere of influence.

Schumacher’s contract is up at the end of this season with Haas and, as yet, there does not appear to have been a massive amount of progress made towards a new deal being agreed.

Indeed, that in mind, there’s every chance he leaves the team and looks elsewhere, and he has now decided to part company with the Ferrari driver programme to potentially widen his options.

Under Ferrari’s guise, it was always going to be likely that he’d be driving for a team with Ferrari power next year – meaning the Scuderia, Alfa Romeo or, of course, Haas.

Now, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz are already locked in with the Prancing Horse and that is obviously the one Mick would have wanted most of all, so it perhaps makes sense that he can look at switching totally to a team that has no ties to Ferrari, with him now far freer to do so.

In recent times we’ve seen him touted to join both Alpine and AlphaTauri, with neither having links to Ferrari, and either switch will be easier without that relationship to the Italian team though, of course, there’s never going to be a complete cut off between parties and nor should there be.

If this allows Mick a better chance of staying in F1 for 2023 then Ferrari were never going to stand in his way as there’s surely nothing more they’d like than him one day peddling for them, for obvious reasons.

Right now, though, Mick needs to spread his wings to try and find a drive for next year – though staying at Haas isn’t impossible – and it just remains to be seen where he pitches up.