"Bumpy road is not acceptable anymore"- Haas boss wants team to 'stabilise' after series of poor results this season
Haas boss Guenther Steiner has said that the team has been going through a rough patch lately, and there's a need to stabilise the results. Haas have not scored points since a double points finish in Austria, where Mick Schumacher was P6, and Kevin Magnussen was P8.
Since then, even though the team has introduced a sizeable upgrade on the car in Hungary, the performances have not been there. There have been a few opportunities that have gone begging as well as occasional issues that have left the team out of points.
Talking to motorsport.com about Haas' recent drop in form, a pragmatic Steiner said that the results have not been good recently and needs to be rectified soon. He said:
"We’ve sometimes been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I put it down to the last two years having been difficult, and you cannot come from that level where we were in the last two years all of a sudden to go out with the best ones in the world."
He continued:
"It will be a little bit of a bumpy road, and we are going through this bumpy road, but we have to stabilise it at some stage. That bumpy road is not acceptable anymore. You can do it for a while."
He elaborated that fans need to understand that Haas was a perennial backmarker in the last two seasons. While they have improved their competitiveness, there's still scope for improvement in terms of operations. Steiner added:
When @Trevornoah met his idol, Guenther, in Austin a few years ago 😂
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“To get up there again, this year is like for us a second start, because last year, we didn’t develop anything; we were running where we were running, the competition wasn’t high. As I always say, the further up you get, the thinner the air gets, the more difficult it gets for the drivers, for the team, for everybody. And every little bit counts.”
The Haas boss added that there have been incidents with other cars that have held the team back. However, they have been happening on the lead lap unlike in the last few years. He said:
"We had incidents when we got lapped the second time around!. I see the good in it. It is frustrating, but it shows I’m not negative about our performance, it’s just frustrating a little bit. We cannot expect to be all of a sudden from where we were last year to go where everybody expects us to be. I think we can do better than we are, and we can get there.”
Haas (34) are joint eighth in the constructor standings, with AlphaTauri, ahead of the US GP in Austin this weekend.
It's about getting the confidence back that we can execute at this level - Haas
After years of toiling at the back as a backmarker, Guenther Steiner said that Haas need to get used to fighting in midfield and that would come with time. He said:
Texas Time 🇺🇸
It’s Home Race Week and we’re super-stoked to be back racing in the States!
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"I think we just need to think about how we approach everything a little bit more in detail. I don’t think it is needed that we change a lot of personnel or anything. We maybe need to add a little bit. But at the moment, it’s more like just getting the confidence back that we can execute always at that level. But these are things that you learn."
He added:
“The most important thing is not to make the mistake a second time around. That’s always the most important thing to me. You can make a mistake once; you fix it; second time, it’s not good. The third time, you’re an idiot, in my opinion, (if you repeat that mistake). So we need to do that one, and hopefully we don’t find any new mistakes that we’re going to make.”
Haas have had a far better season than in 2021, where the team did not score anything.