Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsHaas F1 Team

China a good reality check for Haas - Steiner

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Guenther Steiner has described the Chinese Grand Prix as a good reality check for Haas after it failed to score for the first time this season.

Romain Grosjean had secured two consecutive top six finishes to give Haas 18 points from its opening two races in F1, but China proved a tougher weekend for the team. While Esteban Gutierrez finished a race for the first time this year in 14th place, Grosjean was 19th after first lap damage, but Steiner was still able to take the positives from the difficult afternoon.

Grosjean confronted Ericsson over Turn 1 clash

"It’s a reality check but I think quite a good one," Steiner told F1i. "We know where we are now, it’s like we always said, we will be in that area, around 10^th because without the problem on Romain’s car he would have been up there with the McLarens.

"It’s reality you know but it was good for us because we finished with two cars and it’s not to finish with two cars but to run two cars because before we had the luxury of having a whole team for one car, now we need to get used to running two cars and that was quite challenging with a lot of tyre changes, we didn’t make mistakes in the pit stops."

And Steiner believes a DRS problem prevented Gutierrez from finishing further up the field.

"It was a reality check but it was a good one, if we can get everything right and we don’t have the accident on the first lap with Romain and for sure Esteban we had a problem with him, he couldn’t open his DRS basically so he got stuck behind people. We are where we think we are and what we always said so it’s a reality check but it’s a good one."

REPORT: Rosberg cruises home ahead of chaos in China

Chinese Grand Prix lap-by-lap as it happened

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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.