Haas “readying for disappointment” in Baku as tyre issues continue

Guenther Steiner says Haas is “readying for disappointment” at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix after encountering further tyre-related issues in Formula 1’s Chinese Grand Prix.

After a strong performance at the Melbourne season-opener, Haas struggled for race pace in Bahrain with both its drivers failing to score points.

Having made it into Q3 with both cars in Shanghai, Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen dropped out of contention on their way to finishing a disapponting 11th and 13th respectively.

“Not the race we’d have hoped for,” Steiner conceded.

“It seems that we had a very similar problem to what we had in Bahrain. It was deja vu. So, we need to look into it, and work hard to get this issue sorted.

“We tried but we didn’t fix it. We understood the problem after Bahrain but we couldn’t fix it in time for here, we still need to work on it. We need to keep on working and try and find a solution to our big issue.

“We didn’t have this in winter testing, as the track is completely different to this tracks like Bahrain, here and Baku,” Steiner added.

“Baku is even worse - I’m readying myself for the disappointment. I hope we find something before Baku. At these race tracks we can’t get energy into the tyre.

“It’s high-speed tracks with long straights and low energy corners where we can’t get the heat into the tyres. That’s what it is.

“In winter testing, even if it was cold in Barcelona, you load the tyres a lot, you have energy to put in, you can keep the heat in it. In Australia, the temperature is higher and it was fine. But in Bahrain and here, it just doesn’t work.”

Grosjean and Magnussen both pitted within the opening 10 laps of Sunday’s race after struggling for pace, but lost track position and struggled to make up the deficit.

“I was a bit worried to be fair before the start as our race pace hasn’t been amazing all weekend,” Grosjean, who was narrowly beaten to the final point by Toro Rosso’s Alexander Albon, explained.

“The car’s amazing over one lap, but as soon as we go two laps on the tyres, we’re not there anymore. We need to understand exactly what happened.

“I think without the blue flags at the end we’d have scored a point. Alex did a great job defending well and not making any mistakes. Congratulations to him. It’s so annoying to give it all, push hard, and just not get the chance to score points.”

Magnussen added: “I didn’t have the pace today, so we need to work on the race pace.

“Qualifying’s been good all year so-far, we just need to sort out the race pace - it’s the most important one to be good at. There’s some work to do.

“I don’t really understand it at the moment, and we all need to understand it. It’s not easy. It’s frustrating that we see we’ve got a good car, that can qualify well, then we can’t convert that into race pace.”