Romain Grosjean reckons Haas had more pros than cons in the 2019 F1 season, even though the year didn’t pan out the way they expected it to be.
While Haas did fall down the order quite substantially in 2019 F1 season, with a fundamental car issue plaguing them from Australia to Abu Dhabi but Grosjean was quick to say that the season was not a total failure for them.
The Frenchman backed this up by pointing out the fact that the American team outperformed their car on several occasions, and learned from it to better themselves for the future years, which is always a crucial point for growth.
“Yes it’s been a tough season, but is it a total failure? No. A disaster? No. A good season? No. A bad season? Most likely, yes. Is it a throwaway season? No. Have we learnt a lot? Yes. Have we extracted more than the maximum of the car most of the time? Yes.
“So, if you put the pro and the cons, there is more pro than cons, but yeah the overall picture is not great, because the car wasn’t great,” said Grosjean to media including FormulaRapida.net. “But again we’ve learned a lot more, we’ve analysed a lot more.
“We’ve got engineers working with the car which is not working the way they want, trying to find, where are the issues and all of that has been quite positive, so two ways you can see it: ‘Let’s throw it away’ or there is ‘What can we do better, what did we do well, where did we improve, and where do we need to improve for the future.”
While Grosjean did admit that it was a strange and vexing season in spite of this, he maintained that it was a fun and worthwhile year generally speaking. They initially blamed tyres but it was in fact co-relation, where they lacked as numbers didn’t match.
“I’ve known different seasons in F1, and even before then, but let’s take 2014, we knew we were going to be nowhere, everywhere,” said Grosjean. “That was clear. This year has been a bit more strange as initially we thought it was down to tyres.
“Our qualifying was good and the race was bad because we’re not in the window of the tyres. Later in the year, we thought, it’s got nothing to do with tyes, it’s the car, and the aero characteristics. And, it was, and we found out.
“But I still enjoy working with the guy I work with. Obviously, if you ask me straight after the race, like Mexico, I’m not very happy, and I’m not having a good time in the car, but two days later, I thought, ‘if I wasn’t racing this weekend I would have missed it’.
“It’s a challenging one, it’s a long season, but I still bloody love what I do.” Having finished fifth in the 2018 F1 season, Haas fell to ninth in 2019 with just the 28 points as opposed to 93 they accumulated in the previous year.
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The story was written by Duncan Leahy and edited by Darshan Chokhani
