As anyone who watched the television coverage of Friday's free practice sessions at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, Romain Grosjean was not a happy man in the evening following chronic struggles with the handling of his Haas F1 VF-16 ahead of the Spanish Grand Prix.
Most worrying for Grosjean was the fact that so much seemed to have gone wrong in so many different set-up areas since the car's strikingly strong maidens outings in Melbourne in Bahrain, making it hard to know exactly how to start tackling the issues and get back going in the right direction.
"It wasn't a good day. We struggled with the balance. We struggled with the higher track temperatures," he sighed.
"It is unfortunately everywhere. It is not only one sector. Sector 3 is always the most tricky one, it's where there are the most corners and that is where you lose or gain the most lap time."
Grosjean's team mate Esteban Gutierrez was also left frustrated and angry after an electrical fault sidelined him for much of the afternoon. But after all the setbacks on Friday, Grosjean is now cautiously optimistic that the team knows what it needs to do next.
"I think we have understood now why things have gone that way," he said. "We revert on quite a few set-up changes that we have made in the last few races and the direction we have taken.
"If I look back we could have done things a bit different," he said of the team's approach in China and Russia where there too many unknown variables to allow the team to successfully address specific problems.
"It is just a general philosophy that we have taken since China and we thought was very positive but it doesn't work as we would like. On the paper it could be something very good but it looks like on track it doesn't work work as well as we would like."
By comparison Barcelona is a known factor thanks to winter testing, allowing the team to finally get to the root of the issues.
"Here we are at a track we know with very high track temperature so at least we know things are working properly but car doesn't feel right.
"Hopefully tomorrow is a different story," he stressed. "Now we have a bit of an explanation about why the car didn't suit me in the last two races, so hopefully tomorrow we get back to something I like."
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