The Rich Energy Haas F1 Team will bring ‘significant upgrade’ for this weekend’s Spanish GP at Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona, Guenther Steiner confirms.
With Spanish GP marking as the first European event in the 2019 F1 season, several upgrades are in line for various teams on the grid, including Haas. In what could be termed as a ‘b-spec’ car, Steiner has confirmed of the upgrades to be seen this weekend.
“We’re bringing our first upgrades of the year,” said Steiner. “A lot of parts on the car will change – the front wing, the floor and a lot of the smaller parts, like mirrors. It’s a quite significant upgrade. It’s very important [upgrade]. We have a lot of data [from the test].
“We need to make sure that everything still correlates after four races and that our upgrade works, as well. We’re looking forward to it, to see where we compare from our time there in preseason testing.
“It isn’t really that you can go back and compare the first four races, but Barcelona always affords a good point to regroup after the early long-haul races. We’ve got upgrades coming, but you’ve got more to look at with Barcelona because we ran our preseason testing there.”
Haas looked solid in Australian GP where Kevin Magnussen finished on the lead up which showed the pace in the car. But since then they have struggled to even score a point with tyre troubles hindering their race pace hugely.
Steiner has been open to criticise the new thread compounds of 2019 but eventually they can’t do much about it apart from learning a way to work them in sync with the car. The drivers, meanwhile, are pinning their hope on the upgrades for Spanish GP certainly.
“Everyone’s going to bring big updates, so it’s almost like everyone’s going to have a B-car, therefore the standings could be a bit different,” said Romain Grosjean. “I think it’s important that our updates go in the right direction.
“It’s important, as we know what we can do there. We’ll see if we can repeat that and understand where our race pace has gone.” The drivers have also gauged into the tyre issues they have had, where they face ‘lack of grip and consistency’.
“It’s a lack of grip and a lack of consistency,” said Grosjean. “The latter makes it so that you can’t have any confidence because you can’t push the tire to its limit. If you do go above the limit, which is very low, it’s a big lock-up or you go off the track.
“If the tyres don’t work, the car can be as good as you want, but it’s just not going to work. Confidence is key in Formula One, but when your tyres don’t work, there’s no chance you’ll have some.”
At the same time, Magnussen added: “The weakness that we’ve seen this year is our ability to have good performance from the tyres in race condition. We struggle a lot less over one lap. It’s in race condition we see the biggest problems.”
