Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsHaas F1 Team

Grosjean confident of afternoon recovery for Haas

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Romain Grosjean expects to make up for lost time on Thursday afternoon after a disjointed morning session for Haas.

With Esteban Gutierrez having been hit by reliability issues throughout the opening two days of the second test, Grosjean took over on the penultimate day and was able to complete 59 laps. However, he explained Haas had been targeting much more mileage than that before his session ended in the gravel late on.

“We had some issues early in the morning - I don’t know exactly what they were - and then we went for a long stint because we want to get mileage," Grosjean said. "We did manage to go quite long on the tyres and on the car which was good, so I think much more long runs this afternoon.

“We are trying to investigate [going off]. I locked the front wheel and went straight. Hopefully we stopped before the wall so a bit of cleaning unfortunately and try to understand exactly what happened.

"I removed as many stones as I could! Anyway we have planned to remove the floor to check everything and hopefully we are still targeting 2pm."

However, Grosjean admits he is unlikely to get to push the new Haas in qualifying trim before Saturday in Australia.

“It certainly doesn’t help when you’ve got eight days [of testing] and you miss two, but we are trying to catch back up. We are a new team so there’s a lot to learn, but generally everyone is working well. There are a few areas where we can massively improve but the rest is up there.

“I think more long runs [are needed] to see which parts are the not strong runs. A qualifying run I think would be good but that’s only going to come in FP3 in Melbourne.”

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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.