Steiner: Haas has been 'standing still' since Melbourne

Haas team principal Guenther Steiner has acknowledged that the squad has made virtually no progress this year since the start of the season in March.

And he admitted that the team's shaky form in 2019 has piled the pressure on him as team boss in recent months.

"Everyone knows how I like to race but this is something [else]," he told Motorsport.come recently. "Racing like this, it kills you!"

Despite some strong qualifying performance, it's been chronic incurable tyre issues that have adversely affected Haas' race pace and left the team struggling against their rivals.

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As a result, Haas is currently in eighth place in the constructors standings and eight points behind Alfa Romeo with seven races remaining in the 2019 world championship season.

“At the moment this is our struggle,” he said of the tyre problems that have proved an intractable issue since the start of the year. “Since two or three races we know pretty well where we are.

“You go out with new tyres, the tyres work for two laps, then the temperatures go down and you are done again.

"The drop off is not a tenth or two, it is a drop off that can mean a second," he explained. “We are so on the edge that I don’t know where we are.

“We will try to get solutions to it as soon as possible to see if we can better it," he continued. "I think we understand [what the problem is], but I don’t know if we can get solutions this year.

"Just track temperature can make a difference for us, being in or out. So we are there or thereabouts - or we are out.”

In recent races, driver Kevin Magnussen has been using the latest-spec updated to the VF-19 while his team mate Romain Grosjean has preferred to revert to the set-up used for the very first race in Melbourne.

Steiner said that far from being evidence of a deep schism within the team, the split has actually proved very useful in tracking down the underlying issues.

“Changing over to the Melbourne spec helped a lot to understand it and get the reality of where we are, that is why it was done," he said.

"The Melbourne spec is as good as this one. We know what that means: we didn’t make any progress while everybody else did."

“In the first year with the new regulations you have to make progress, and we didn’t," he sighed

"That is where we are. That is why the car was good for testing and Melbourne, and then we stood still.”

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