Team Talk - Sunday in Bahrain

Haas F1 Team

Nico Hulkenberg (GER) Renault F1 Team RS19 and Kevin Magnussen (DEN) Haas VF-19 battle for position.

Romain Grosjean
“I didn’t see anything at the start, I got hit from behind, then the car was too damaged to continue ultimately, but I’d lost so much time with the initial rear puncture heading to the pits. That’s always the risk when you start not where you want to start. We should have been starting eighth today, but it is what it is. I think we’ll have a good test on Tuesday to understand what happened today with the pace of the car. It’s obviously not performing as we want it to.”

Kevin Magnussen
“I don’t really know what happened. We were a little bit skeptical about our race pace after Friday, but honestly, I thought we would have corrected that with the changes we made. It’s a little unbelievable to be able to qualify sixth, best-of-the-rest, then be so off in the race like we were. We need to try and understand why we were so far off in the race, having been so good in qualifying. We have some homework to do.”

Guenther Steiner, team principal
“It was a very disappointing race, not least with Romain (Grosjean) effectively going out on the first lap, having been run into by somebody. The performance was just not good enough today to get into the points. We need to investigate why this happened, especially after a strong qualifying. We’ll try to find the cause of it. On the plus side, at least we now have two days of testing here, so we can maybe try to learn what happened. We go back to square one and start afresh in China.”