Nico Hulkenberg delivered a championship point to Haas in Saudi Arabia last weekend, but the German driver admits that the US outfit's top-ten finish was only made possible by a DNF from one of F1’s top teams.
In Jeddah, Hulkenberg's result was greatly facilitated by the handy and opportunistic team-work executed by Kevin Magnussen.
The Dane’s evening was ruined early on when he was handed a 10-second penalty for elbowing his way past the Williams of Alex Albon on the race's restart after the early Safety Car period.
Magnussen then opted to use his penalty to his team’s advantage by deliberately going off track on lap 16 of 50 to seize P12 from RB’s Yuki Tsunoda and install himself, not only in front of the Japanese driver but also ahead of a train of cars representing almost the entirety of the second half of the field!
The strategic ploy – although it cost Magnussen a second 10-second penalty – enraged Tsunoda and his team but worked like a charm as it allowed, as intended, Hulkenberg to build a cushion that would keep him ahead of his pursuers after his switch from the medium to the hard tyre.
After his pit stop, the German had a clear path to P10 thanks to the costly mistake made earlier in the race by top-ten contender, Aston Martin's Lance Stroll.
“I feel happy, obviously, because scoring a point is quite tough these days and it takes one of the top five cars to drop out, which happened today, and we managed to capitalise on that,” said Hulkenberg.
“I think a very good strategy for the team to split the cars under the Safety Car, then good pace from myself and good work obviously from Kevin who was playing the team game, helping me a lot in my race and that was the foundation to be able to score points.”
©Haas
While Haas’ rivals were fuming over the US outfit’s team tactics, which RB racing director Alan Permane labeled as “unsportsmanlike”, team boss Ayao Komatsu was ecstatic over the outcome and his team’s valuable point.
“It's incredibly important, it's like a gold dust," commented the Japanese engineer.
"We've got the top five teams and then we are effectively competing for P10, one point, with so many other people, so everything has to be perfect."
"I'm so happy for the team, everyone's done their bit," Komatsu added. "Operationally, as a race team it was close to perfection."
Ahead of the season, Komatsu was anything but optimistic about Haas’ early form, as the team had yet to unravel the mystery surrounding its cars’ chronic tyre degradation problems which date all the way back to 2022. P10 was therefore definitely unexpected.
"It is a surprise, because we are the smallest team, so we've got to assume all the gains we are finding over the winter, everybody else has to be finding it at a minimum,” he explained.
"At that point in pre-season, we hadn't addressed any of our race and tyre management issues.
"Of course, the car is better than last year, but then you can see the lap time delta changes depending on Bahrain, depending on circuit like this with much higher speeds.
"We knew here in qualifying our best would have been like P12, whereas in Bahrain we were in Q3. But in the race we had a strong car."
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