Steiner: Haas aiming to step up its game for Spa and Monza

Haas F1 boss Guenther Steiner says that that the team is aiming to hit the reset button and come back strong after the summer break.

Haas struggled in the final two races before the shutdown. Both Romain Grosjean Kevin Magnussen missed out on points at both Silverstone and the Hungaroring.

But Steiner says that the team is putting that behind them, as it heads into back-to-back races at Spa and Monza. Both are known as high speed power circuits, with Steiner aiming to use that to his advantage.

“It is nice to have two similar races one after the other," he commented this week. "If you’re good in Spa, you normally should be good in Monza as well.

"But it can go the other way, too, so let’s hope we are good in Spa!

"We are bringing some items for low downforce or low drag for Spa and Monza. We are as confident as we can be that it works, but everybody else will be doing the same.

"It will be, as always, a tight pack in the midfield.

Gene Haas bewildered by gap with top three teams

"We struggled a little bit in Hungary with it being a low-speed track," he admitted, casting his mind back a month. "The weekend in Hungary certainly tested the team.

"But it showed how hard we work to overcome adversity while remaining positive," he continued.

"Belgium is a new race and a new opportunity," he added. "We tried to hit the reset button, but we don’t know what we have until we get [to Spa] and get our running in."

"It’s such an up and down in the midfield," he pointed out. "Right now, it seems teams like Renault and McLaren have made gains, but maybe it is track specific.

"Nobody really knows. Everyone is speculating and I don’t want to make a speculation.

"We will do the best job we can in all of these circumstances," he pledged. "Everybody is trying to do the best they can and we will do the same.

"To speculate about what others are doing doesn’t help you. We just need to work hard and try to make the best out of it.”

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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.