Haas plans Carbon Industrie brake trial at Silverstone

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The Haas F1 Team is planning a new trial of brakes from Carbon Industrie on Friday, during practice for the British Grand Prix.

The team has been struggling with braking issues all season. It currently relies on components from Brembo. However, it trialled brakes from the alternative vendor during the Russian Grand Prix weekend in April.

While the team eventually opted to stick with Brembo in Sochi, work has been continuing on a possible switch.

“We have a plan to fit the cars with Carbon Industrie brakes on Friday," confirmed team principal Guenther Steiner. "Both cars in FP1 and hopefully FP2, to see if it all works on our second attempt.

"If it all works, we will use them over the weekend," he added. "But we can only commit to that after we’ve had one practice."

The reason why the new brakes weren't an immediate success in Russia was due to cooling issues. Steiner said that the squad's technical team had been addressing how to fix that problem without compromising the aerodynamics of the VF-17.

“The aerodynamics team did a lot of CFD work," he said. "Then we had to modify the brake discs according to what we found using CFD.”

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One of the reasons that Haas is so keen to run the new brakes this weekend is because of the high-speed nature of Silverstone, making braking so crucial.

“We’ve gone faster at every circuit this year because of these new cars with the new regulations," Stainer acknowledged. "With the wider cars and more downforce, we just go faster.

"If the engineering team gives them a good, stable car, [the drivers] are not afraid to go flat-out.

"But they need to be confident that the car will do what they want the car to do - and that is down to the engineering team."

“The car must be stuck to the ground. As soon as you take away too much downforce, the tyres won’t last and you begin to have graining.

"We have to take off just enough downforce so that the car doesn’t slide and start going through the tyres too quickly.

"It’s less about the driver feel and more about tyre preservation," he added. "The driver may be more comfortable when the tyre is going away, but then you risk the chance of the tyre going out.”

"There is always a compromise between corner speed and straight-line speed. That's best found in the simulations before the race weekend. Normally, you get very close to it - but the fine-tuning is still on the track."

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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.