'Haas is a match for Toro Rosso' - Steiner

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Halfway through its debut season in the Formula One, the Haas F1 Team lies in eighth place in the constructors championship having slipped back from some of its eye-catching early points-paying successes at the start of the year.

However Guenther Steiner, team principal of Haas F1 Team, has insisted that the team isn't going backwards and remains very much a match in terms of performance with teams several places ahead of them in the standings such as Toro Rosso.

"[Germany] showed we are stronger than Toro Rosso," he told reporters this week. "We are not always stronger than Toro Rosso but on a good weekend we can be better than them.

"In my opinion that is an achievement," he insisted. "For us that’s pretty good in our first year of Formula One because Toro Rosso has been here a long time. We were very close to the McLarens, which isn’t bad."

After scoring three points in three of the first four Grand prix races of the season, Haas has found it difficult to maintain that form and only finished in the top ten again in Austria largely as a result of a series of reliability glitches.

"I think we started very good and always when you start very good the expectations get higher. We still have to not forget we are only 12 races in and there is no magic in this business.

"Is the car getting worse? No. Are we not clever enough to sort the problems? No. We have a good team of people," Steiner insisted. "We had an issue with the brakes [in Germany] which is no secret, a lot of the teams did, but I think we got on top of it.

"We had a problem with the cooling behind the car - when you are too long behind someone you get less cooling. It went away again when we got out in fresh air. It’s one of those things, this is hard for braking. I think Singapore will be hard, we will be on the limit.

"We still have some [new] parts for Singapore," he added. "A front wing, a floor and rear brake ducts. I hope they work, we developed them a few months ago and we'll try to make more points."

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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.