Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsHaas F1 Team

Haas to announce first driver on Tuesday

The Haas F1 Team will announce one of its drivers for the 2016 season at a press conference on Tuesday.

Team founder Gene Haas and team principal Guenther Steiner will make the announcement at 11am local time (4pm BST) from the Haas F1 base at Kannapolis in North Carolina. A team spokesman confirmed to F1i only one of its drivers will be announced.

Romain Grosjean is likely to be the driver confirmed, with the Frenchman having decided to leave Lotus for Haas as revealed by F1i last weekend. Speaking about his future plans in the Suzuka paddock on Thursday, when asked if confirmation would come next week Grosjean replied: “Probably.”

Grosjean will partner Esteban Gutierrez at Haas, with the Mexican driver having been selected for the second seat by the team's technical partner Ferrari. However, an announcement regarding Gutierrez is likely to be made around the double-header of races in the United States (25 October) and Mexico (1 November).

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.