Haas to trial new brakes on Friday at Sochi

Haas F1 will try out a new brake supplier this weekend, after suffering a number of brake-related issues in 2017.

That's a surprise given that driver Romain Grosjean said this week that a change was unlikely to happen in Sochi.

Up to now the team has been supplied by Brembo, but they will start the Russian Grand Prix weekend with brakes from Carbone Industrie.

However it's not certain that the team will continue with the new brakes into the race itself, as team principal Guenther Steiner explained.

"At the moment we have all options open to us," Steiner told Motorsport.com on Thursday. "We need to see how we do in FP1, and then we'll see what we'll do for the rest.

"Hopefully we can stay on them, because in testing they were performing well," he added. "The drivers were happy with them, and they were consistent. That's the main thing. We want to get to the point where brakes are no issue any more."

"We'll continue with what we tried in the Bahrain test and see how it goes," added Kevin Magnussen. " It's always good to try different things, and we felt that there were some positives with the CI brakes.

"We'll continue like that, we can always go back."

Haas 'won't be one hit wonders', insists Steiner

After a sobering start to their second season in Formula 1, Haas is getting back on track having scored points in two races in succession. That gives Steiner cause for some optimism coming into this weekend's Grand Prix.

"It’s always good to come back from two races with points," said Steiner. "It shows that the car is capable to score points at each race.

"Then again, it’s always difficult because it’s a tight midfield. We all went testing after Bahrain and everyone has learned something.

"“Like always, the more data you get no matter where you are, the more you can improve. You learn every day whenever you race.

"[Sochi] is very similar and a lot of people learned in Bahrain and learned from the test. So again, it starts at the beginning of the weekend where we try to fight our way into Q3 and into the points.”

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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.