Grosjean: Haas slightly below expectations after tough run

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Romain Grosjean says a recent tough run of form has left Haas "a bit less" competitive than he was expecting at the start of this season.

Haas started its debut F1 season in spectacular fashion with a sixth place in Australia being followed by fifth in Bahrain. Four further points followed in Russia but the team has failed to score in any of the last four races, causing it to slip to eighth in the constructors' championship.

With the team only eight races old, team principal Guenther Steiner has often said the opening results increased expectations beyond a reasonable level, but when asked if his total score so far is above what he was hoping for at the start of the season, Grosjean told F1i: "A little bit less.

"After winter testing I thought we could be close to the top ten and score points on a regular basis. After the first races everyone was like ‘Come on’ and then in China we just thought ‘China is a tricky one’. Then in Russia we managed to score points but it was more thanks to race incidents and we’ve been close but not good enough."

And Grosjean feels Haas can make the necessary improvements without bringing updates to its car, highlighting the tyres as the key to its performances.

“It’s not missing a lot, we are talking about two or three tenths per lap that we need to find, and once we get there we should be able to come back in the points more regularly.

“I think it’s in the car but it’s hidden by something we don’t understand. So we don’t have the grip we should have, we don’t have the confidence we had earlier in the year anymore for some reason. I think it’s due to the tyre not working because everything else is hidden by that. So if we solve that it should put us in a much better place.”

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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.