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Steiner expecting 'rollercoaster' season for Haas

Guenther Steiner expects Haas to have a "rollercoaster" rest of the season despite getting on top of its tyre concerns at the Austrian Grand Prix.

After an impressive start to the season with consecutive top six finishes, Haas had only scored four points from the next six races as it struggled to get its tyres to work properly. However, in Austria it stayed off the ultrasoft tyre and managed to get the supersofts and softs to work well, resulting in a seventh place finish for Romain Grosjean.

Asked if the progress seen in Austria provides a platform for the rest of the year, Steiner replied: “I wouldn’t want to predict that, it will still be a rollercoaster for us this season.

“By no means are we perfect, and the midfield is so tight with McLaren, Toro Rosso and Force India. Any of them on a good day are faster than us, but any of them on a bad day are only a little bit faster.

“We will now get the new upgrade on the engine for Silverstone, the whole package, so that will help us, but in our own little world we are doing pretty good.”

And Steiner confirmed a lot of work has gone on in order for Haas to try and get a better understanding of the tyres.

“For everybody it’s a bit of an Achilles heel because you see with strategies that some can do it, some can’t.

“So that has been the main focus of our race engineers, to find out when the tyres work, where do they need to be temperature wise to work. A lot of work has gone into them, a lot of deep analysis to understand them more.

“It was about collecting data, to see why they were doing certain things at a certain temperature, to check everything out because there are so many things that influence the tyres.

“It has not just been about us being a new team and trying to work it out, a lot of the teams are looking at it as well because the tyres are the same for everyone, and we all need to find the sweet spot.”

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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.