Yahoo Autos Haas could use Austria ‘like a test session’ to solve race day woes – Steiner
Haas team principal Guenther Steiner says he is open to compromising the final results in the Austrian Grand Prix weekend in order to try and solve this season’s race pace issues.
Standout performances in qualifying for both Nico Hulkenberg and Kevin Magnussen have tended to be quickly wiped out by tough races for Haas, with the most recent example seeing Hulkenberg go from fifth to 15th in Canada. Steiner says there are a some potential solutions that Haas has identified and with the Sprint weekend in Austria the team will get two opportunities to trial them.
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“We’re going into this race partly a little bit like a test session as well,” Steiner said. “We have a lot of things to try and cure our problems with the race pace, so we have a few ideas. As we have two races now this weekend, we’ve got double the amount of time to try to do different things. Obviously, we always try to get the best result possible but also maybe we compromise the best result possible for really understanding what is happening with our car on race day.
“I must admit, I’m actually very happy with both Kevin and Nico about how they’re an integral part in trying to sort the problem and find the solution, how we tackle the short and long-term fix for this, and they’re both very positive. Not about the performance in the race right now but positive that we can get out of the problem we have now.”
And Steiner says the work that has been ongoing not only relates to trying to improve results this season but also removing any inherent issues in the car design for 2024.
“We’re investigating the very good performance we have in qualifying and not-so-good performance during the race at the moment. We’re trying to pinpoint it but for the next races we’re maybe going to try and find a sweeter spot between the two sessions, qualifying and the race, so something in the middle. We’re working hard on it and trying to find out what we can do over the next races to make it better.
“We’re working very hard to try and find out why the discrepancy of being very fast and not so good in the race is happening. We’ve got a few leads and for sure it will impact the VF-24 design. We obviously have to take that feature out of the car next year.”
