If you listened to our recent interview with NBC Sports reporter, Will Buxton, and NBC producer, Jason Swales, you’ll find this story from Autosport to be corroborative to the comments that both Will and Jason offered.
When queried, both gentlemen felt that Haas F1 may have had reliability concerns in Australia but there is a much deeper undertow to their weekend in the guise of sheer pace and performance that placed them ahead of the Williams F1 car o Felipe Mass by four tenths in qualifying.
I said, during our race review podcast, that Haas F1’s performance may just answer the big question of how much Ferrari has gained this season with their engine performance and it seems I’m not alone in that praise as Haas F1 boss, Guenther Stenier, said:
“If you’ve got speed, you can get reliability,” he said.
“It’s not good not to have it in the beginning, but not to have speed would be much more difficult to fix than the reliability.
“We are cautiously optimistic. We need to still prove that our performance wasn’t a one-off.
“It’s very tight in the midfield. On a good day, you could be on top, but on a bad day, you could be at the back.
“The other midfield teams have shown that this can happen.
“I think we surprised a little bit with our performance, especially Romain qualifying sixth with his lap, which was four-tenths faster than (Felipe) Massa’s.
“That’s pretty good.”
As Buxton said in our interview, and I am paraphrasing here, the team will get on top of the reliability issue that may just leave them fighting for best of the rest ahead of Williams, Force India and Renault. That, I think you would agree, would be an epic evolution for a team that is only two-years old.
Hat Tip: Autosport
It’s a shame Magnussen couldn’t do more with it…
With Stroll still learning the ropes, they really need both cars at the sharp end of Quali to get maximum points.
If he can’t close the gap to Grosjean, maybe HAAS could look at Giovinazzi for a full time drive…
(Ferrari power in the back and in the driver’s seat, so to speak…)
With 11 laps to go Magnussen reported a suspension failure, Magnussen asked his pit wall whether to bring the car back to the pits and was told “stop the car where you are”.
After the race upon inspection it was discovered that the real cause of the problem was a front right puncture.
Nice article and HAAS are proving many self proclaimed experts wrong. Before their first year, the naysayers were sure they would be running at the back of the field but the business model employed is proving to be not only against the grain but very effective in proving “the way it’s always been done” is not the only way to be successful.