Grosjean saved Haas from 'a world of hurt'

Romain Grosjean's performances in 2016 saved Haas from "a world of hurt", according to team owner Gene Haas.

Ahead of its debut season in Formula One, Haas managed to entice Grosjean to leave Lotus - later taken over by Renault - to join his team. The Frenchman delivered immediately with sixth place at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix followed by fifth in Bahrain. With Grosjean again scoring points in Russia, he had amassed 22 points from the first four races.

While the form tailed off, Grosjean was responsible for all 29 of the team's points in 2016 and Haas says that return showed he was worth the investment.

"I tell you, if it wasn't for those 29 points we would have been in a world of hurt," Haas told ESPN. "So that in itself, just scoring those points, was worth every penny with him coming on board. I'm disappointed we couldn't keep that same rate as we could have got 100 points [by season's end], but I'm very happy with what we got."

With Kevin Magnussen replacing Esteban Gutierrez next season, Haas highlights the Dane's ability to bring home points as one of the reasons why the team made the change.

"I think Kevin brings a racer's perspective to the team. I think he's good at getting points when you need to, which is extremely difficult to do - you can be extremely fast in qualifying and individual laps, but racing on race day is a another discipline. There are some people who are really great at it.

"We were talking to Kevin even before Grosjean [in 2015], we knew that he had a lot of potential. I've watched him drive around a lot of circuits and watched him in traffic and I think he has the ability to grab points when we need to, and that's what we need."

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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.