Haas F1 Team head Guenther Steiner says they are working slightly differently, so as to avoid the repeat of 2019 in 2020 F1 season.
Haas had a solid winter testing in 2019 but all was undone once the F1 season kicked-off as the American outfit struggled with co-relation issues and fell behind. Their drivers Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen pushed them for changes eventually.
It led them to understand the core issue and get on top of it. From the latter half of 2019, Haas had been spending time to recover and put things in place for 2020. Looking to avoid a repeat, Steiner says that they are trying to do things slightly differently.
“I’m taking things on board,” said Steiner including FormulaRapida.net. “We are not going to make mistakes like last season. Yes, I say definitely yes to that, we understood that, we are working a little bit different on it and there can still be mistakes.
“But I think if I would say we didn’t go our lesson and be stupid like last year, I mean, that wouldn’t make me feel great, saying no, I ignore everything what I learned last year, I just keep on going head down like we did last year.
“No, we learnt our lesson and we are humble. And try again, like two years ago, let’s speak about two years ago. Also, the drivers are making the right noises. Obviously a driver is never happy and especially if you have to think what happened to us last year.
“I mean, we were very happy with it. Then it is ended up not to be good. So everybody’s very cautious. We are very cautious in our prediction for this season, because we don’t want to be ‘it’s all good, it’s all good,’ then fall hard.
“So we do a diligent job and try to do the best and see where it takes us. But that’s happened every year, just last year, the developments didn’t work. So we ended up where we ended up.” The Italian did not wish to predict but added that mid-field will be close.
Overall, Steiner was pleased with the work done by Haas in the first test, even though they did the least number of laps at 314 – more so because of the crash for Grosjean on Day 2 and then Magnussen on Day 3. The latter had a wheel rim issue to spin out.
“The spacer between the wheel and the hub was broken, and then the wheel machined itself in bits and pieces and the air got out and the tyre went off and he went off,” explained Steiner on Magnussen’s issue with wheel rim in his #8 Haas.
“So that was what it was. Now when you look at it, it’s a pretty simple failure, but it shouldn’t happen. Looking ahead for second test, there’s plenty of that to do. I mean, I think we didn’t have any mechanical issues or anything.
“Like any any mechanical problem, it’s just like going through the data and to always try to
find more speed, which is a nice position to be in that you don’t have to work on problems because the car breaks.
“And the car was very reliable until the wheel rim issue happened, and it’s easy to fix. So on that side, we’re very positive.” Lap time wise, Haas found themselves in the latter half of the standings but Steiner did not wish to speculate much on it.
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