Haas F1 Team
Romain Grosjean
“It’s not been an easy day for everyone. The tyres are very tricky to work. I’m not so happy with the tyre pressure we have to run here. It makes things challenging. On supersofts in the afternoon, we ran better. The car felt more together, which was definitely a positive. Unfortunately, we couldn’t do a long run because of an issue, but hopefully that won’t cost us too much in the race. We still have tomorrow morning to prepare for qualifying, and try a few setup tricks that we’re thinking of. Generally, I think all our energy will again be on tyre usage.”
Esteban Gutierrez
“It was very tricky conditions today. It’s not common in Spa to have heat like this. The track is really hot, so we’re struggling a little setting up the car. We’ve done some tests to try to understand it a bit better, so now we’ll have a clearer direction as to where we have to focus. In both sessions we ran the Pirelli prototype tyres. They were pretty transparent. There was nothing very different with them. In FP2, we also did a race simulation, which I wasn’t too happy with, so we’ll be analyzing all the data this evening to try and find a good setup for tomorrow and continue through the weekend.”
Guenther Steiner, team principal
“In FP1 we had very similar issues with the cars, basically understeer in both, Romain probably a bit more than Esteban. We found something between FP1 and FP2. Things got a little bit better, but we still need to find a more stable balance for tomorrow. All in all, the second session was ok – nothing fantastic, nothing really bad. We just need to find more so the drivers are happy with the balance of their cars. Romain’s session stopped short by a few minutes, as we saw an issue with the MGU-K. We decided to stop as a precaution and not risk breaking something. He didn’t get his long run in, but we will make it up tomorrow.”
