Losing F1 career cost Mazepin 'several million'

Mar.26 (GMM) Nikita Mazepin claims the way his Formula 1 career abruptly ended ultimately cost him “several million dollars”.

The Russian, backed by his father’s company Uralkali, was sacked by Haas at the outset of the Ukraine war – and even prevented from racing elsewhere due to being specifically named in European Union sanctions.

Mazepin, 26, subsequently challenged the sanctions – and ultimately succeeded.

“According to European constitutional law, you can’t just sanction a person,” he told sports.ru. “The wording said that I was connected to my father’s business activities.”

And Dmitry Mazepin, his father, has been closely linked with Vladimir Putin.

“My father is a successful entrepreneur who started a business from scratch – a major taxpayer in Russia,” Nikita insisted.

“The (Russian) state, in their (Europe’s) opinion, uses tax revenues to finance actions punishable by the European Union. But in two and a half years we have explained that there is me on one hand and my father on the other.

“We are different individuals, with nothing in common in business. And the existence of family ties does not allow the European courts to impose sanctions on me. That’s why they were lifted.”

Mazepin admits his chances of ever returning to F1 are very slim. So how much has the entire saga cost him, financially?

“I lost a long-term contract with Haas,” he explained. “It contained quite a few sums that would have multiplied every year. I think it would have been several million dollars.

“Also, I had certain European property that I lost when the assets were frozen and I did not get it back after they were unfrozen.”

It has been reported that one of Mazepin’s lost properties was a villa in Italy.