Steiner hopes Grosjean will calm it down in 2018

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Haas F1 team principal Guenther Steiner has admitted that he would dearly love his lead driver Romain Grosjean to find some calm and quiet in 2018 when it comes to team radio messages.

However, he admits it's unlikely to happen.

Grosjean's frustrated outbursts and complaints abut the handling of his car have been a staple of TV broadcasts in 2017. By the time it got to the United States GP in October, Steiner's response to the driver's latest tirade was a succinct "shut up!"

“In Austin he was getting too much," Steiner explained. "I told him we could hear him, but if you keep talking then we cannot talk to you.

"If you are on the radio all the time then how can we tell you what to do? So somebody had to stop him - and usually that is me."

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But Steiner insisted that despite the evidence of the team radio, there was no real friction between team and driver. He also felt that Grosjean was finding a better way to channel his frustrations.

“It is less, but I didn’t do a proper study on it,” he said. "I think he has calmed down and realised it doesn’t help. Not that it is good or bad, just that it doesn’t help.

"So why get like this rather than working in a constructive way?

“He still has his outbursts but normally they are shorter," he continued. "Unlike Austin, when we had a bad day."

Steiner felt that he was unlikely to really be able to do anything about Grosjean's fiery temperament, and had given up trying.

"Even if I did study it I can’t fix it anyway," he said. "We speak sometimes about it but not about fixing it. More about what he thinks it does to help.

"He has calmed down but still has he peaks," he added. "I will not change that.”

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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.