Guenther Steiner is not terming their Haas as a ‘b-spec’ car with the updates that they are bringing in Austin.
Considering the issues that Haas has faced during the course of the F1 2023 season especially on the race pace side and tyre degradation, the team were forced for a rethink. Before summer break, they eventually decided to a route with some bigger changes.
While the extent of those changes will only be seen in Austin when they will first use those, Haas team boss Steiner isn’t terming those changes to make it a ‘b-spec’ car yet. The team is banking on the updates as it is the direction that they are to go for 2024 and beyond.
Haas has had struggles on low downforce circuits but at the same time, they are not the strongest either on high downforce circuits. They land somewhere in the middle which is why they had to take up a different route to progress through the standings.
“I wouldn’t call it a B-spec because we don’t touch the suspension or the gearbox, nothing like this,” said Steiner. “We go with the bodywork style like almost all the other teams have got. At least seven of them have got. So, we go that direction and just start a little bit afresh with the concept, which will hopefully get some performance out over time, which we couldn’t get with this concept we have got now, we couldn’t find any performance anymore.
“I think we understand not fully the issues a little bit. This car is still always a surprise. I think we know why we were in Monza where we didn’t want to be and obviously we are working hard to get out of that hole – but it’s not only Monza. I mean, Monza, obviously it highlighted more because it’s a high-speed track and that is our worst place always to be on the high-speed tracks.
“So, low downforce, we are just weaker than we are normally – and we are not very strong when we are at our best. It’s just that we struggle this year a little bit. I mean, we started off, it was OK and then couldn’t gain any… couldn’t make any progress, performance-wise. We just couldn’t find any performance. Therefore, we didn’t bring upgrades because there was nothing to be upgraded because what we found wasn’t any better.
“So, we had to make a complete U-turn and go a different direction. And that’s what we did: we decided before the summer break to do that. And now we bring something for Austin, a big upgrade. For us, a big upgrade. To also go in the direction we want to go… or we are going next year, not ‘we want to go’, we are already going that way.
“And just to learn as much as possible, and hopefully bring some performance for the last five races. We need to see what it does but also to understand where we are going next year a little bit better, because what we have got now, we just don’t know what the car is doing from weekend to weekend,” summed up Steiner.