08/06/2018
NEWS STORY
Though Haas is due to introduce its much anticipated upgrade this weekend, – which will feature a new front wing, floor and bargeboard area - a number of incidents in the preceding races has left the American team somewhat short of spares.
Furthermore, with five races in the seven weeks that follow Montreal, there will be little opportunity to build up the requisite number of replacements.
Consequently, the order has gone out to Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen - surely two of the hardest racers in the business - No crashing!
"The spare situation with old parts, it's quite bad," said Guenther Steiner, according to the official F1 website. "I think with the spares position we are in now, we had a few crashes lately, so that never helps you. And at the same time we were planning to do the upgrades, so you had both things going on and that's why you end up with no parts. It's one of those things.
"In Monte Carlo, we had issues," he continues. "We had to take some parts off the car just not to lose them. We were conscious to not put anything at risk.
"We know how much downforce we lost with that, so we can get back why we lost the time. It's not like, 'Wow, we performed bad and we don't know why'. We know why, and that's a good thing."
Asked about the extent of this weekend's updates, he admits: "Quite significant, I would call it. But I'm always careful with updates because I've never seen a car in the middle of the season do magic. Our car is not bad. We just need to keep up with doing updates... because we need to develop.
"Like everything, all the performances need to get better," he adds. "We need to get quicker. It's a long process from aero development, to aero sign-off... to structural analysis to production, so... in that span of six to eight weeks, we need to find two weeks to get quicker so we can up the game. And that just comes with experience. We need to go through the learning phase there."