Steiner admits frustration over 'accident-prone' Grosjean

Romain Grosjean (FRA) Haas F1 Team on the drivers parade.

Haas F1 team boss Guenther Steiner has admitted to growing frustration with the tendency of his driver Romain Grosjean to get into trouble during Grand Prix weekends.

It looked like Grosjean has finally put his run of bad luck behind him after he took a brilliant fourth place for the team in Austria, winning his first points of 2018.

But it was back to the same old story last weekend at Silverstone, when he clashed with his team mate Kevin Magnussen on the opening lap and then crashed out on lap 37 while tangling with Renault's Carlos Sainz.

Steiner said that Grosjean had apologised to Magnussen after the race for the first lap clash. He was relieved that the team had still scored points at Silverstone after Magnussen went on to finish in ninth place.

"I wouldn't call this bad luck," Steiner said of Grosjean's latest misfortune. "It's a little bit frustrating.

"We all hoped for him that we are going uphill and now we are down again in the dumps and we need to get out of it again," he continued. "We will get out of it. It's always hard work.

"Every time we hope that everything turns for him, but it happens again. We will certainly cope, but it's not easy."

Grosjean apologized to Magnussen but Haas lost out - Steiner

Steiner insisted that he continued to be supportive of Grosjean: "And I will be because that is what I need to be because we want to succeed as a team."

But while reiterating his support for Grosjean, Steiner also sounded like his - and the team's - patience with the French driver is starting to wear thin.

"We can't keep on doing this," he admitted. "We are through half of the season and we must have lost a lot of points because of our own mistakes.

"That is not actually acceptable.

"We need to score points, do the maximum in every race weekend. It's important for us to move forward rather than standing still."

"I support Romain and that's my duty, because I care about the success of the team. How long will it go on? I don't know when the critical moment will come.

"I am are not there yet. But at some stage, as I said before, we need to stop losing points. That is the tipping point.

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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.