Guenther Steiner hopes Haas F1 Team’s radical tyre choices for this weekend’s Canadian Grand Prix will ultimately pay dividends.
F1’s official supplier Pirelli has selected the soft, supersoft, and ultrasoft compound for Montreal, namely the same nomination as for Monaco two weeks earlier.
The Italian company revealed last week that Haas and Renault elected to avoid picking any set of supersoft tyres.
The US newcomers have gone for the more aggressive strategy as they load up on the ultrasoft with 10 sets (out of 13) apiece for Romain Grosjean and Esteban Gutierrez and only three sets of softs available to them.
By comparison, Renault pilots will get eight sets of the purple-marked rubber along with five sets of yellow-walled tyres. Steiner concedes Haas took a chance with its Canadian GP tyre allocation.
“We’re only using the ultrasoft and soft,” he said. “It’s a challenge to find the perfect working ranges for these tyres. We’ve never had the ultrasoft in Canada. It just debuted in the last race at Monaco. We need to see how that tire works, specifically, in Canada.”
“We only tested the ultrasofts once before making the decision to use them in Canada, and that was in Barcelona [testing]. We will see in Canada if we made the right decision.
“We know more about the ultrasofts now after having used them in Monaco. We just need to do our best to make them work as best as possible.”
As a reminder, F1 teams have to make their selection known 14 weeks prior to flyaway races like Canada.
Haas has become quite accustomed to making bold tyre calls this year. The gamble paid off in Bahrain where Grosjean ran three stints on the softest compound available (then the supersoft ) to finish a stunning fifth on merit.
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