P8 for Grosjean 'a fantastic result' - Steiner

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Haas team principal Guenther Steiner described Romain Grosjean's eighth place in the Russian Grand Prix as "a fantastic result".

Grosjean scored for the third time in four races having avoided the incidents on the first lap which accounted for a number of quicker cars. The Frenchman was eighth at the end of the opening lap and Steiner was delighted to finish in the same position to bring the Haas points total up to 22 in its debut season.

"It’s a fantastic result," Steiner said. "You never give up in this game. We had a difficult China, we went back and looked at what we did. FP1 and FP2 were difficult, that was a learning session, FP3 was a little bit better but it wasn’t perfect.

"Qualifying, we got in to Q2 which as I always say we don’t ever forget it’s our fourth race. It wasn’t bad but then finishing eighth is fantastic again. Again it shows that if we get it right the car can do it, the driver can do it, the main thing is now we need to get more data to get better and better.

"We need to be better as a team to react to special [situations]. Like this track is special, it’s very slippery, low grip. Once you have the experience you know how to react, we don’t have the experience between the car and everything to put it together. Once we have the experience we should be able to react quicker and to get the better set-up for qualifying. But it will take a little bit of time to have that one all ready.

"The youngest team is five years old, we are four races old, so I think they have got a little bit of an advantage over us there which we can never make up. But we work hard, everybody works hard and tries to do their best and that’s what gets you the points."

However, Steiner admitted seventh place was there for the taking with Renault using the undercut by pitting Kevin Magnussen a lap earlier to get ahead of Grosjean.

"I think we underperformed a little bit in qualifying but then we got the chance at the start with a little bit of havoc to get ourselves into a position and once we get there we can keep it.

"On the pit stop Magnussen undercut us but that can happen, it’s difficult to manage because he got stuck behind another car so he couldn’t pull a lead out but then again [Sergio] Perez we kept him behind. So it’s good. We didn’t expect to finish eighth and if it’s there we take it.”

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AS IT HAPPENED: 2016 Russian Grand Prix

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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.