Haas desperately in search of solution for tyre deg issues

Guenther Steiner says Haas must "go back to the drawing board" and find a solution to the chronic tyre degradation issues that are plaguing the US outfit's races.

In Barcelona last weekend, Nico Hulkenberg qualified eighth, but the German driver was unable to capitalize on his fantastic performance in the 66-lap race.

A taxing three-stop strategy, imposed by the excessive tyre wear on his VF-23, left Hulkenberg a lowly P15 at the checkered flag.

"Tough. Difficult. Unfortunately, the deg was really high for us," commented the Hulk after his race.

"And we had to three-stop the race, where I think the competition two-stopped, and still the pace is similar to them.

“It looks at first glance that over one lap obviously we are competitive, but in the long runs we still have some homework to do, and some pace and deg to find."

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"At the beginning of every stint, we were very competitive, but our tyres just fell off so quickly, and we had to do a three-stop which wasn’t that optimum," added Kevin Magnussen who concluded his Spanish Grand Prix well down the order in P18.

"Hopefully, we can try and learn about what caused it and improve, but certainly it was a tough race. When you have a bad weekend like this, you tend to find some interesting answers and that’s what I’m hoping for now."

And Steiner suggested that those answers will only be found by the team starting its tyre wear investigations from scratch.

"Quite a disappointing result today, we just couldn’t get the tyres to stay alive," Steiner acknowledged.

"We did one more pit stop than everyone else, but even if we hadn’t stopped, we would’ve gone slower and ended up there anyway.

"We need to go back to the drawing board and try to find a solution to our tyre degradation."

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