Haas team principal Guenther Steiner is confident his team will be able to carry its Japanese Grand Prix form through to its home race in Austin thanks to a new front wing.
In its first season in F1, Haas has scored points in four races but also finished in 11th place on a further seven occasions. The team looked competitive in Japan with both cars in the top ten, but failed to convert that into points as Romain Grosjean slipped from seventh to 11th and Esteban Gutierrez came home in 21st place.
Having found impressive qualifying speed and shown good race pace despite the result, Steiner says a new front wing is central to the drivers’ confidence.
“I think the new front wing they are very happy with that one, how it behaves, more in total than overall downforce, it’s more like the behaviour of the car now which he likes better and [Grosjean] can be more aggressive,” Steiner said.
“I think that’s the main thing that we found the better balance. On Friday we struggled [at Suzuka], but I think I said it before and I may repeat myself we had this front wing since Malaysia but we were never able to test it properly and find a setup or balance with it, because we always had some struggles in FP1 or FP2. So if you have a little bit of struggle in one car, you need to find out about your tyres, you cannot develop a new front wing.
“There’s no point to have a good front wing and you don’t know what your tyres are doing, so we focussed on it, we had a little bit of a better weekend without big mechanical failures or anything, so we got it sorted and we got a bit of an understanding for [Suzuka], I hope we can carry it into Austin. But that is the main reason for Romain to be a little bit happier.”
And Steiner made it clear he felt it was simply car performance which led to a more competitive showing, rather than specific aspects of the conditions during the Suzuka weekend.
“I think it’s a genuine potential with the new front wing, it’s not more the temperature of the track which favours us, in Spa and Monza we were pretty good, this is quite high speed, I think it’s a track which favours us, we are not this good in slower tracks. I don’t think the track temperature had a lot to [do with the pace] … I think this type of track this car likes.”
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