Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsHaas F1 Team

Still 0.5s of pace for Haas to unlock - Grosjean

Romain Grosjean believes Haas has up to half a second still to unlock from its 2016 car.

The new team has made a remarkable start to life in F1 with Grosjean following up sixth place in the Australian Grand Prix with fifth at last weekend's race in Bahrain. Despite the impressive performances - which Haas admits have exceeded expectations - Grosjean believes there is plenty of pace still to be unlocked from the VF-16.

“Behind Ferrari would be nice!" Grosjean joked when asked about where Haas could end up. "On paper we are not miles off Ferrari. Lap time wise … I don’t know how much was track evolution but let’s look at the end of Q2 [in Bahrain] where we are one second away, a bit more than that.

"It’s not ridiculous if we get everything right we should have another 0.4-0.5s possibly to gain.”

And when pushed on whether that pace will translate in to an improvement in races too, Grosjean replied: "Yes, in the race there is more performance coming as we're not at 100% of the set-up.

"There are going to be circuits that suit us better than others and we have to keep working, but yeah, I think we can [aim high]. We are a new team - it's not like the car is perfect and we can put it on track and that's where we are. We have a very good baseline, but there are a few things that we can improve."

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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.