Guenther Steiner revealed that Haas F1 Team is unable to solve the issue of re-heating the tyres after cool down phases.
The 2019 season has been one of confusion and frustration for Haas F1 Team, as they’ve desperately tried to figure out Pirelli’s 2019 spec tyres, trying to understand what’s wrong, as they’ve struggled to get their tyres into the proper temperature range.
In a bid to fix the issue, Haas even went back and forth between car specifications from differing stages of the season’s development and recently, they’ve landed on a hybrid spec- a mix of an early-season spec and a later, more recent design.
Using this franken-spec, Haas have found some extra pace, however, the F1 Japanese GP at Suzuka was still a struggle for the team with Kevin Magnussen crashing in qualifying and neither driver scoring points. Romain Grosjean was 15th and Magnussen 17th.
Post-race, Steiner revealed about the troubles in details where he explained that the Haas drivers are facing issues to re-heat the tyres after cool down phases in the races, be it a safety car re-start or VSC or when moving out of the way when shown blue flags.
“It’s just more of the same,” Steiner started. “I think they now know, that these things happen, they are never nice, they actually happen but you go in the race, always knowing that at some stage we will have an issue with the tyre, because we cannot generate the heat we need to make the tyre work.
“So as soon as blue flags come in, you slow down, the tyre gets cold, we cannot get the heat back in and you fall back. It sounds almost too simple not to have a solution for it, but that is what is happening.
“So, even if we can qualify on one lap normally decently but we cannot hold on in the race, because of this reason, we just cannot keep the heat in the tyres. We know where we are, why where we are, but to fix it is a different issue.
“And I don’t know if we can get on top of it this year consistently. Maybe we have got a solution but its only four races left anyway, but if we get one or other good day, but in general, I could not tell you the next two races we are bringing upgrade kit, which will solve the problem.
“We just need to make sure that this doesn’t happen next year, because it is quite consuming.” Looking at the races ahead, Steiner warned that the upcoming Mexico GP won’t be one for the liking to the Haas car’s characteristics.
Here’s the tyre choices for Mexican GP
Japanese GP: Key statistics and information from 2019 F1 race
The story was written by Duncan Leahy and edited by Darshan Chokhani
