Only a Formula 1 Grand Prix has passed in 2021, but fears that Russian driver Nikita Mazepin is the new big danger on the track are quickly materializing and it is no exaggeration to think it will wreak more havoc in the future.
The Haas team steering wheel, unfortunately for him but fortunately for the rest of the grid, lasted no more than 24 seconds at the Bahrain Grand Prix, which ushered in the 2021 F1 season.
The setback paints him full body. He starts in the last row, has trouble getting around the first two bends, and in the third without any contact in the middle or any other obstruction, he loses control and ends up against a retaining wall.
It’s not about scrapping the crashed cart (to paraphrase the fallen tree), but in my opinion, the 22-year-old remained on the circuit two more curves than he would have expected, with the fortunate circumstance that it did not affect anyone else.
So as he recently posed a certain risk of trying to maneuver alongside Romain Grosjean, because the Frenchman in his eagerness to give dignity to the catastrophic Haas car often ended up on the edge of the track, now passing close to Mazepin will be an extreme sport.
In Grosjean’s defense, the Gaul is a good pilot who battled with a terrible act and put himself in great danger. We all saw what happened in Bahrain, the fire and how it saved lives.
That of Mazepin in a separate case, because he is a boy of irresponsible handling, questionable talent and insufficient merits to be in the highest category.
A good driver in a bad car is a danger to himself, because when he tries to make this car manageable or fast, he will get lost. But a driver of dubious skills and no outburst in a bad act is a danger to himself and others, because not only will he try to take away from the car what he does not have, but on the way he will also threaten he to the rest of the performances on the track for his lack of skill.
This seems to be Nikita Mazepin, who is unfair to compare with the Venezuelan Pastor Maldonado, as some daring already do on social media. It is unfair for Pastor, who, while he had many more setbacks in F1 than he would have liked, was able to win a Grand Prix and was GP2 champion.
What the Russian, the son of the owner of a gas company, does inherit, is the unstable pilot label that many attributed to Maldonado.
And Mazepin is not being judged for a career, but for an extensive log of dangerous situations in his sporting life, and to show what has happened in 2020 during the F2 race feature in Bahrain (so it looks like the place of the their ‘big hits’).
This December on the Sakhir track, Nikita was about to turn Yuki Tsunoda and Felipe Drugovich into “murals” by pulling them off the track in a straight line and forcing them to go against a wall. Several changes in trajectory, totally unsportsmanlike. If he had done this 2,200 years ago at the Roman Colosseum he would have come out on his shoulders, with laurels on his forehead, but he no longer competes in chariots nor are the races to death.
Earlier, in 2019 inside the F3, Mazepin caught Callum Illot by surprise because he blocked it in practice. Thus immature and unbridled collisions, actions, and attitudes can be enumerated.
Off the track was his famous Instagram story where he was recorded abusing a woman who was intoxicated, a “sin” that the Haas team, which had just announced for 2021, has reproved but in no way endanger the seat that his father – formerly an official of the Russian gas parastatal, today owner of it (amazing how there are people who are progressing so rapidly in the economy) – bought, because there there is another explanation, for him.
All of this tells us about a pattern of behavior. The FIA will have to take into account the history of the Russian if he needs to decide whether or not to punish for his actions on the F1 tracks.
Hopefully a little exaggerated. Let Guenther Steine and Gene Haas get the best out of him and make him a responsible pilot. That what sits here is just the past and that Mazepin is, not only fast as he has shown in his career, but a pilot who manages to mature. Hopefully.
But the one that is born by ball of bolig either goes by the channel or takes to several ahead.