Haas F1 Team boss Guenther Steiner has lauded the effort and attitude of his team to fightback in the 2018 season despite certain adversities.
Already in the pre-season test, Haas looked like the team to have made the biggest step in terms of performance. It was proven in Australia as well when they ran inside the Top 5 at one point until the double disaster in the pits.
Even though they did get the fourth and fifth place result in Austria but the incident certainly shook some of the confidence especially with how they conducted the pit stops. Certain on-track mishaps and the disqualification in Italy added to their misery.
However, the team was able to rise up and fight back to end up fifth – their best result in F1 in only their third season as they scored 93 points in all which is almost double of what they managed in 2017. It also included their first-ever fastest lap as a team in Singapore.
“For me it is like, even if you a mistake once, it’s not OK but the important thing is that you don’t make the mistake a second time – that is what you call it learning,” said Steiner to the media including FormulaRapida.net.
“We had this disaster with the pitstop in Australia but we didn’t have one afterwards. We are very thorough [with these things]. We are in a good place [now] and we just need to make sure that we keep this good place.
“It is because the pit stops after that, we did slower than what they should be. It was the right thing to do as we got our confidence back, we got the processes back, and we acted rightly and nobody was just there blaming somebody.
“This was just one of the stuff we got better this year and there are a lot of things that you don’t see from the outside. There is a lot of stuff that we will get better at because we made a mistake and we decided we are going to fix it and everybody is behind it to fix it.
“I always say, our team is pretty good. [Yes] it was our own fault that we didn’t finish fourth [but] I think it is part of the learning we have as a team. [Remember] we are only in our third season and to finish fifth is great.
“To finish first of the privateers, I would put it because the guys in front are all works teams except Red Bull but they work like a works team. I mean Red Bull is not a private team, they are well funded.
“For sure we could have been fourth, but ‘could’ and ‘would’ doesn’t do you anything, so I decided to be happy with fifth.” Haas did chase Renault in the fight for fourth after Racing Point had their troubles but fell short against the manufacturer.
