Haas not getting 'overenthusiastic' over recent run of points

Guenther Steiner says Haas isn't getting carried away with its consecutive double-points finishes in Britain and in Austria, insisting the string of good results won't easily continue.

While Kevin Magnussen had put points on the board for the team at three of the four opening races of 2022, his Haas teammate Mick Schumacher scored his first career top-ten in F1 at Silverstone where he finished P8, the young German following up that performance with an impressive P6 in Austria.

Both races yielded double points for Haas which now sits seventh in the Constructors' standings, ahead of AlphaTauri, Aston Martin and Williams.

Although Haas ambitions to add to its tally over the summer, it's unlikely that double-points finishes will become the norm warns Steiner.

"I’m very happy about it but I’m very happy about it for the team because I’ve told them that they need to believe in themselves because we’ve done it before and we will do it again, and we have so it’s a very good result," said the Haas team boss ahead of this week's French Grand Prix.

"I think we have to be careful about getting too overenthusiastic for the next races, so we’re not thinking that this will keep continuing easily – this is very hard work from a lot of people.

"We will do the best we can and hopefully we can get some more points and have quite a relaxed summer break."

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While keeping his team's expectation in check, Steiner says that Haas holding its own in seventh position in the championship is a reasonable end-of-season target.

"I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but if we can keep seventh, or to end up sixth – it would be nice," he said.

"I think anything above sixth will be very difficult because the other teams are very good and they’re a little bit far ahead.

"If we can keep on going as we are going, obviously we will not have the perfect race weekends like the last two with both cars scoring points, but we just need to keep on working hard and maybe we can achieve sixth.

"First of all, we need to make sure that we stay seventh."

Normally, next weekend's race at Paul Ricard will be the last event in which Haas will run its VF-22 in original spec, with the car's long-awaited upgrade package appearing next week in Hungary.

Steiner believes the versatile characteristics if Haas' contender can deliver another productive race weekend to the team.

"For sure, motivation is very high within the team after two weekends like we had in Silverstone and Austria," said the Italian.

"Our car is pretty good everywhere, I think our weakest point is high-speed tracks like those in Jeddah and Baku and coming up in Spa and Monza.

"I’m very confident that if we execute well, we can have points again. I don’t know how many but the reliability in the last two races was good and hopefully it will stay good for the next events before the summer."

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