Steiner 'amazed' by best test ever for Haas and for F1

Haas team boss Guenther Steiner rates last week's pre-season test in Bahrain as the best ever, not only for the US outfit but also for F1 overall.

Haas logged 415 laps of Sakhir over three days or 2,245 kilometres, which equated to the fourth best mileage of all ten teams.

With disruptions kept to a minimum out on the track, most teams were able to run through their development programmes unhindered.

Steiner for one was impressed, insisting it was the best preparation period ever for Haas.

"Preparation wise yes, and running wise," Steiner said. "I think it’s the best one in Formula 1 ever.

"We’ve seen, how many red flags? Three? Everybody doing the laps… If you go to the lap count of the previous season, first test, this never happened before in my opinion.

"I’m so amazed about it. Five years ago every two, three hours there was a red flag. Now we’re all doing the laps, just boom, boom, boom."

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Steiner admitted that on a comparable basis Haas was facing a low bar in pre-season testing compared to last year.

“I think that going back to the best test we ever had – we had the best test because last year was our worst test because we were down so much," he said.

"This year we went through our full program, almost everything. We lost a few runs because of the throttle issue we had, but not a lot.

"The guys got a lot of information. This car is an evolution of last year so it’s not a completely new car, you can learn a lot quicker because you know what you will encounter and mechanics take less time to do things, do set-up changes, because last year everything was new."

Kevin Magnussen, who set the fifth fastest lap overall in testing last week, is convinced that Haas has taken a step forward with its VF-23. And the Dane is excited about the future.

"Haas definitely has taken a step," he said. "It’s a new era for the team that we’re stepping into, I would say.

"It’s exciting, we’re heading in the right direction. And it’s going to be exciting to see where we go.

"Everyone in the team can see that we’re in a good place and that we’re moving forward and getting closer to achieving the goals that we have for the team. And progress motivates everyone."

A year ago, Haas was forced to ditch its main sponsor, Russia's Uralkali, and pay driver Nikita Mazepin on the eve of the 2022 season.

Twelve months on from that troubled time, the US outfit has a new commercial partner, MoneyGram, and some brighter prospects to cling to.

For Steiner, its worth recalling the difficult times, if only to measure how far the team has come since then and the grit it showed.

"I almost cry about it!" he said. "No, we had a little chat a few days ago, and said think about what we had to do last year at this time. It was like, how the hell do we get out of this hole?

"Because we keep on falling into holes. You think back now… I think how we handled it I still wouldn’t do anything different."

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