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When Haas announced Mick Schumacher would not remain for a third season in 2023 and Nico Hulkenberg would take his place, it was a clear vote for experience over youth.
It was also a risky call for Guenther Steiner and his team to make, as Hulkenberg had spent the bulk of the three prior seasons on the sidelines and would naturally have to shake off that racing rust – at least in the early part of the year. They needed Hulkenberg to perform, not just to support their efforts to move further up the midfield, but validate their choice of him over Schumacher.
Although the 2023 season did not go the way either Hulkenberg or his new team had hoped, he at least proved that they were absolutely right to place their faith in him. While there were not many stand-out performances from him through the season, that was largely due to the car he had to drive throughout the year.
Haas suffered all season with a chronic tyre degradation over long runs – something that heavily limited both Hulkenberg and team mate Kevin Magnussen’s abilities to fight for points throughout the year. Points did come, of course. But only twice – in Australia and Austria.
That weekend in Melbourne was probably his most outstanding work of the season – and one where he might have even been within a sniff of that elusive first podium. He was quicker than Magnussen across the weekend and secured his second Q3 appearance in the opening three rounds in qualifying. Then in the race, Hulkenberg ran solidly in the top ten from the opening lap until the second red flag.
Restarting from ninth, he evaded the chaos that unfolded ahead of him to jump to fourth place when the race was red flagged for a third time, with a possible penalty for Carlos Sainz Jnr meaning a podium may have been about to fall in his lap. However, the race order was reset to the restart order, minus the two crashed Alpines, leaving him down in less exciting but still very strong seventh place.
Austria was another weekend where Hulkenberg showed what he can still be capable of when given the opportunity. Another Q3 appearance in Friday’s qualifying was followed by a brilliant fourth on the grid for the sprint race. After overtaking Sergio Perez in the opening laps of the wet sprint race, Hulkenberg managed to keep the Red Bull behind him for nine laps before Perez finally got by. Although he fell to sixth by the chequered flag, that was still three well-earned points. Sadly, Hulkenberg never got the chance to fight for more on Sunday as a power unit problem ended his grand prix after just 12 laps.
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In the second half of the season, those rare opportunities to fight for top tens vanished as the competition picked up and Haas’s tyre wear problems started to increasingly hold them back. But despite the limitations of his car, Hulkenberg continued to out-perform Magnussen more often than not, beating his team mate to the chequered flag five times over the seven races following the summer break in which they were both classified.
There were some sub-par performances over the season, but they were largely concentrated over the early rounds of the year. His first race back in Bahrain, he received 15 seconds of time penalties for exceeding track limits five times over a race where he lacked the race pace of his team mate. His first experience of the Miami International Autodrome did not go well as he crashed in the opening practice session and again finished considerably behind Magnussen in the race. Then the next round in Monaco, a lap one divebomb on Logan Sargeant earned him a puncture and a penalty.
But for the majority of the season, Hulkenberg could be pleased with his driving, even if he could never be satisfied with his results. When the only direct competition he had was his team mate who he was regularly beating and often finishing ahead of drivers in cars that ended the season with far more points than Haas, he could at least head into the off-season knowing that he had made a decent showing of himself and had proven that he was still worthy of a place among the 20 elite drivers in the world.
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