Haas F1 not expecting ‘magic’ from Canadian GP upgrades

The Haas Formula 1 team is not expecting “magic” results from its significant Canadian Grand Prix upgrade package, according to team principal Guenther Steiner.

The American squad is set to be bolstered by a new front wing, floor and revised bargeboard on its VF-18 as Haas looks for a return to form following its lacklustre performance at the Monaco Grand Prix.

Unlike many of its midfield rivals, Haas opted not to bring a significant upgrade package to May’s Spanish Grand Prix, though it still managed a strong result as Kevin Magnussen finished sixth.

Steiner said his team was prioritising extracting the most out of its promising 2018 package as oppose to simply relying on new parts in Barcelona, and he reiterated the point once more in Montreal, despite the introduction of revised aerodynamic components.

“I am always careful with the updates because I’ve never seen a car in the middle of a season do magic and our car is not bad, we just need to keep up with the doing updates because everybody else does them because we need to develop,” Steiner explained.

“The plan was to keep on developing and going into next year’s car already development but that now has changed a little bit with the changing of the rules for next year so you cannot apply it as one to one anymore as it was planned.

“It’s a significant upgrade and we are expecting to go faster but we will never know because we have nothing to compared it with,” he added. “If we go faster we will blame it on the upgrade, if we go slower we will blame it on the upgrade. We cannot revert back the car, it is what it is. We couldn’t put the old floor on anymore.”

Steiner said everything the American squad has seen in the wind-tunnel thus far points towards the updates being a success in Canada.

“Up until now, that we’ve seen in the wind tunnel and what the aero department predicts, it’s working,” he said. “Hopefully it does it here but I would have no reasons why not to believe it because whatever they did in the last 18 months was fine.

“It’s same the people, it’s the same tools so I am pretty confident that what we see in the windtunnel is what we will see on the track. It gives me confidence.”

Haas heads into this weekend’s race level on points with Toro Rosso and occupies eighth place in the constructors’ standings, just seven short of sixth-placed Force India.