©Haas
Haas boss Guenther Steiner was at a loss to explain the wide performance swings impacting not only the US outfit at Paul Ricard but other teams as well.
Haas' qualifying session left little to be happy about with Romain Grosjean failing to make the first cut while Kevin Magnussen was a lowly 15th in Q2.
Ahead of the French Grand Prix weekend, Steiner was hopeful of Haas performing well around the 5.8 km layout while qualifying has typically been the team's strong point this season.
Steiner noted however that Haas wasn't the only team to suffer from baffling performance inconsistencies at Le Castellet.
"The whole weekend was weird," Steiner said.
"If you look into the sessions, all of a sudden one team goes up to fifth best and then they are down again. It’s all over the place. And we don’t understand it.
"If we knew what was happening then we could fix it, but at the moment we don’t know what we need to fix.
"That’s what we are discussing: What actually is going wrong here?
"If there would be an easy answer, if it was only ourselves, that would be one thing, but the others must be confused as well because the swings are quite dramatic.
"We don’t understand it and I don’t think the others do because otherwise they wouldn’t have the swings. That’s my guess anyway.
"I don’t want to speak for the other teams; I’ve got enough to do with my one!"
Looking ahead at Sunday's race, Steiner drew some optimism from the long-run performance displayed by the team's VF-19 on Friday.
"Let’s see tomorrow because it seemed that on Friday our race pace was not too bad - not as bad as it was at the last race in Canada, so maybe we can do something there. But qualifying was absolutely not to our liking.
"It’s just lap time. The balance sometimes seems to be not so bad, the drivers said.
"It’s just grip, the general level of grip. It’s not that they complained it was massively over- or under-steering; it’s just we are not so fast, which is very odd."
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