Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsHaas F1 Team

Kerb vibrations caused Haas front wing failure

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Haas team principal Guenther Steiner says Romain Grosjean's front wing failure was caused by vibrations over the kerbs in Bahrain.

Grosjean's front wing dropped as he ran wide over the exit kerb at Turn 13, with part of the wing breaking off and being left on the circuit. With Haas having had a front wing failure in pre-season testing, Steiner confirmed Friday's problem in Bahrain was an unrelated.

“It wasn’t a failure, we had a problem and something broke when we went over the kerbs and it touched the kerb with the vibration so we are working on it now to fix it," Steiner said.

"It doesn’t seem to be a big problem to be fixed but again it is the first time we go over these kerbs and get these vibrations so we are learning but it doesn’t concern us. We need to fix it but we know what we need to do.

“Absolutely nothing to do with [pre-season], it was the complete vibrations which did it here. It just shook too much and then it touched the ground, but nothing to do with the failure because that one – touch wood it’s fixed.”

Grosjean returned to the track after the failure but was forced to pit again after there was smoke coming from the back of his car. However, Steiner also believes the problem was much less serious than it appeared.

“Yeah it was a small oil leak, we think it’s on the gearbox, it’s not off the gearbox yet and it’s just a drop of oil on the exhaust system made it smoke but the data shows there is nothing on the engine, nothing on the gearbox which shows because this gearbox and engine they bleed quite a little bit of oil; and just one drop on the exhaust… Again we have not seen anything on the data which is wrong and we are taking off the gearboxes now to check where it came from.”

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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.