However the F1 section is not so impressive. Over the years there were some good weekends, and some very good ones, but he has yet to secure a podium finish.
Since the end of his final 2019 season with Renault he has been out of a fulltime job. He returned to ‘Team Silverstone’ as a reserve, and successive bouts of Covid for Sergio Perez, Lance Stroll and Sebastian Vettel gave him a few opportunities to race and show that he could still get the job done.
Nevertheless after a couple of outings with Aston Martin at the start of last year even he seemed to have accepted that he’d missed the boat, and that he wouldn’t get another chance.
In the light of the Schumacher comparisons earlier in his career it was perhaps ironic that an unexpected opportunity came courtesy of a fraught 2022 season at Haas for Michael’s son Mick. As is well documented in Drive to Survive the younger German had a series of huge accidents, and team boss Guenther Steiner ran out of patience.
Having already replaced the outlawed Nikita Mazepin with Kevin Magnussen at the start of 2022 he accepted that the decision to go with two rookies the year before had not paid off. The sheer cost of crash damage proved key to a team that had to balance its limited budget and at the same time was also heading towards nudging the cost cap in 2023.
Quite simply he wanted another experienced driver, and when the Ferrari-favoured Antonio Giovinazzi had a silly crash at the start of FP1 in Austin it was obvious that Hülkenberg would get the nod.
Thus far Steiner couldn’t be happier with the choice, and Hülkenberg was up to speed from the start of testing in Bahrain.