Grosjean seeking fix to Haas balance issues

Ahead of this weekend's German GP, Romain Grosjean has urged Haas to sort out balance issues which affected the Frenchman's run last Sunday in Hungary.

After starting his race from P11, Grosjean raced only briefly among the top ten before lingering most of the afternoon around P14 where he eventually finished, his VF-16 chassis suffering from a sudden balance deficit.

"The balance was absolutely nowhere, and that's what I want us to understand before Germany," Grosjean said.

"After qualifying it's difficult to know exactly what happened, but clearly something in the race didn't go as planned, and we had problems we shouldn't have had.

"We just need to analyse because the car was very much on the nose in high speed, and I had a huge amount of understeer in low-speed corners.

"So we just need to make sure all the maps are correct, there is not something pushing the car, with the front behaving as it should when we turn the wheel. That is where we are going to focus because it was very strange."

His troubles notwithstanding, Grosjean believes that with every race, Haas' understanding of the inner workings of its car is improving, especially with regard to tyre management.

"The more time we have, the more experience we build up as a team, the more we can understand the tires. We’ve also created tools to help the tires to work and put them in a good window."

Grosjean will be running in Hockenheim the same tyre compounds - medium, soft and supesoft - as in Hungary. But while one would believe this would introduce some helpful consistency into the mix, Grosjean minimizes the back-to-back use of the same tyres.

"It doesn’t mean much to have the same tyre compounds on back-to-back weekends. So much depends on the track, the tarmac and the temperature.

"It’s very difficult just to be able to say that because we were good on a certain tyre at a certain track that it just reapplies. You always need to re-think these things and start at the beginning."

A winner at Hockenheim during his junior career, Grosjean is a fan of the German track which hasn't changed much over the years in his view.

"It actually hasn’t changed at all since those days. It’s always great to visit somewhere with good memories.

"I won at the circuit in Formula 3, and in Formula Renault 1.6. I won there in the GP2 Series until a post-race penalty dropped me to second.

"Every year is different though. It doesn’t matter what happened in the past. The important thing is to make it count now."

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