Haas needs to get its act together - Steiner

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Haas team principal Guenther Steiner says his team needs to "get our act together" over the final two races of the season.

Mexico saw Haas struggling as both cars dropped out in Q1 and Romain Grosjean finished a lowly 20th, one place behind team-mate Esteban Gutierrez. Steiner says Haas never got its car performing to its potential at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez and wants his team to finish its debut F1 season on a high.

"We could not get the balance of the car, we were all over the place," Steiner said. "We couldn’t get tyres to work we were out of the window. We just didn’t perform [all] weekend. We have to be honest with ourselves and say we didn’t do a good job this weekend starting on Friday.

"I was hoping we could regroup on Saturday but you saw our qualifying it was appalling. We just need to get our act together over the next two races because we know we can to do as we got into Q3 just two races ago. We will try hard in the next race."

Asked how to rectify the problem, Steiner says a smooth Friday is key to Haas performing well over a race weekend.

"We need to work on going out on Fridays and actually practice and not spend half the time standing in the garage because that is the worse bit as we don’t learn. Here we had one car down in FP2 and then we tried to do all the work on the tyres with the other car and you can’t do it all and then you don’t get any set-up work done. That is our biggest handicap at the moment that in the last two races we didn’t have a clean Friday and Saturday.

"If something breaks on an installation lap, like the ECU, what can you do? You try to do your best but stuff like this happens. You have to keep your heads up and keep digging."

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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.