Haas’ two-car Q3 appearance “unbelievable” - Grosjean

Romain Grosjean has hailed Haas’ qualifying performance for Formula 1’s Brazilian Grand Prix as “unbelievable”.

Having struggled for performance in recent races, the American squad impressed in qualifying at Interlagos to get both its cars into the top-10 shootout for the first time since May’s Spanish Grand Prix.

Grosjean ultimately set the eighth-fastest time while teammate Kevin Magnussen was 10th-quickest in the final segment of qualifying. Both drivers will each move up a place on the grid for Sunday’s grand prix after Charles Leclerc’s engine penalty is applied.

“It was a brilliant job by the team,” Grosjean explained. “Having both cars in Q3 is unbelievable.

"Tomorrow might be a different day, but that doesn’t matter, we’ll take the pleasure from today.

“We didn’t really get to show the speed we had in final practice. I had confidence that we might be around P11. Then obviously Q2 went really well, and Q3 wasn’t too bad. We were only two-hundredths of a second off being best-of-the-rest.

"I’m happy for the team, it’s a brilliant job from everyone.”

Magnussen, who was 1.5s off the pace having completed just a single run in Q3, feels Haas might have “something to fight with” in Brazil.

“It’s good to have both cars in Q3 again,” he said. "It looks like we might have something to fight with this weekend, which is really good.

“There’s nothing to be disappointed about from today. The circuit and conditions were right for our car. It’s been very up-and-down all the way through the year, so it’s not a surprise that we can do this.

“I’ll be more surprised if we can finish it off tomorrow, we know we struggle a little bit with tyre management in the race. We’ll certainly be giving it our all though.”

Haas team boss Guenther Steiner added: “FP3 didn’t look good on the timesheets but we knew what was possible today.

“I think in qualifying the whole team and the drivers did a great job to get everything out of the car. It was a fantastic execution of a qualifying session with some fantastic drives.

"It’s good for the team, everyone’s worked hard for this, and we never give up. "We keep on fighting and today we’ve had a good result. Hopefully, tomorrow we can do something, for sure we’ll be trying.”