Haas focus remains on beating Renault amid F1 court case

The Haas Formula 1 team’s focus remains on beating midfield rivals Renault on-track, ahead of the looming court date over its disqualification from the Italian Grand Prix later this year.

Haas believes the Italian Grand Prix stewards were wrong to exclude Romain Grosjean from his sixth-place finish at September’s Italian Grand Prix after an FIA inspection deemed that the floor on the Frenchman’s car did not comply with the rules.

Haas currently sits fifth in the 2018 constructors’ championship and is 11 points adrift of fourth-placed Renault, having lost the eight points Grosjean scored at Monza.

Ahead of this weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix the FIA set a court date of November 1, with the hearing set to take place in Paris. Despite the prospect of the off-track legal battle, Haas team principal Gunther Steiner insists his outfit’s focus has not been affected.

When asked by Crash.net if the court case is playing on the team’s mind, Steiner replied: “No, on the team it doesn’t play… there is a team which got involved in it, which did the appeal, which had all of the correspondence before that we got this decision, that was the team.

“That was the four or five people focused on it. All the rest don’t have anything to do with it. Now we’ve done all our paper work, we get together again two days before.

“You go through everything, then we go again. This is not a thing that we keep on dragging on and thinking about. We’re very focused, let’s do this, this and this with the timescale, and they did a good job on that.”

Steiner reckons it is “crucial” for F1 that a verdict is reached ahead of the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix on November 25 and believes Haas has done the best job possible in preparing for the court date.

“I think we do our best and let’s see what the jury decides,” he explained. “I cannot influence that because we say to ourselves we’ve done a good job, and then you can say that you’ve done a good job and you’ve lost anyway because they think you are wrong.

“What we can do on ourselves is say we’ve done a good job, we submitted everything, I think it was Monday we submitted all our appeal papers, the proper ones.

“We did I think a good job, our team and our lawyers. On November 1st, we see how it goes. I actually don’t know when they will announce the verdict of the appeal. I don’t think it’s there and then.”

But he stressed Haas’ priority remains with on-track results and getting ahead of nearest midfield rivals Renault.

“That is much more in our control than other people’s control,” Steiner said. “On the track we can make a difference, while the court of appeal, we did a good job, what we did, but the team can’t make a difference there.”