Haas F1 Team
Romain Grosjean
“We’re missing downforce here and paying a heavy price for it. This is a track that needs a lot of downforce and we just don’t have enough. Low speed is very difficult for us. We were struggling here yesterday with some pieces coming off and we didn’t learn much on track. Today is a bit of a summary of yesterday. We’ve been on the back foot since the beginning and we just haven’t had the grip. We’re good with the top speed but, unfortunately, the pace of the car overall doesn’t look good for tomorrow.”
Esteban Gutierrez
“It hasn’t been an easy weekend for the team. We struggled a lot on Friday. Today we focused and gave it everything we’ve got and this is the best result we could get. Unfortunately, we lost some parts on Friday and we’re not using our new front wing, so that’s a few tenths that could have helped us get into Q3, which is what we’re looking for. In the end, it all comes down to focusing and driving as quickly as possible. This is what I did today and it’s what I’m going to do tomorrow to try to get the best result for the team.”
Guenther Steiner, team principal
“Not an unexpected qualifying result. We struggled yesterday. We had a lot of downtime with small issues on the cars, so we didn’t do a lot of running. In FP3 we got a little better understanding and then finished 14th and 17th in qualifying. It was a very good job from Esteban to get into Q2. Romain almost made it, but he got a bit hung up in traffic in the last sector of his lap, so he ended up 17th, just one place out of Q2. We will try to do our best tomorrow. Nevertheless, we’ve learned a lot over the weekend. We keep on learning every time. Last week we had both cars in Q3. This week we got stuck with one car in Q1. It’s so close in the midfield, and that’s the main reason why these things happen. Our car doesn’t seem to be very good in the slow-speed areas and you can see that on sector three of this circuit. But we’ll be up and going for tomorrow and aim to have a good race.”
