Grosjean: Haas has to pick up the pace on development

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Romain Grosjean says that his team needs to pick up the pace of car development in the future if it is to progress in Formula 1.

Haas F1 has just completed its second year in the Formula 1 world championship. The tendency has been for the team to start strong, but then drop behind its rivals as the season progresses.

"We've seen two years in a row where the trend is to go a bit down in the year," Grosjean told GPUpdate.net. "We started twice with a very good platform, and we've been struggling."

The French driver had definite ideas about where the team had room for improvement next year.

"I think development," he suggested. "[We're] still not up there with tyre usage and understanding. So they're the two main areas."

Team principal Guenther Haas has admitted that the team may have played it safe by switching its development focus to 2018 too soon. That decision likely affected its late-season performance.

Grosjean felt Haas' unique distributed organisation structure could be another possible factor in Haas's current struggles.

"Behind the scenes there a few things we can co-ordinate better between the factories," he noted. "[Ferrari] in Maranello, the one in Dallara, the one in England. Getting things to run smoother and more efficiently.

"There's a lot of work we need to do in the future, a lot of areas we can improve," he added. "But I think the model is working pretty well."

Magnussen aiming to up his qualifying game in 2018

That said, Grosjean wasn't unhappy with the year-on-year progress made by the team in 2017. The team was eighth in the constructors standings for the second year, but its points tally improved from 29 to 47 points.

Grosjean himself was responsible for 28 points. He finished in the top ten on eight occasions, with a best result of sixth in Austria.

"I think it's a good year," he insisted. "It's only our second season in Formula 1, and there's been a big change of regulation.

"It's always the toughest one, the second one, so I think we've done very well," he said. "When you know three teams are untouchable it's pretty good, that's super positive."

Now the team's sights are set on beating their immediate rivals and being 'best of the rest' behind the Big Three.

"Of course, it's always going to be harder to get up to the next speed," Grosjean admitted. "But that's clearly the target for the future."

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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.