Formula One newbie Haas has stunned the viewers with their impressive skills this season as they managed to clinch a sensational sixth place in their debut during the Australian Grand Prix, courtesy of Romain Grosjean.
The Frenchman took benefit of the early red flag caused by team mate Esteban Gutierrez and McLaren-Honda’s Fernando Alonso, which they crashed at high speed and derbis were scattered all over the track.
The points-finish made the headlines in the sport and also the United States, as the nation have never made its presence in almost 30 years. Despite the triumph, team principal Gunther Steiner claimed that the team is not too overjoyed by the success and will remain humble as it was just an opener.
“I think it resonated in a very positive way in all of racing in America,” Steiner said as quoted from Crash.net
“Even those who don’t follow F1 considered it a big achievement for a new team to finish in sixth place and to be from America, which hasn’t had a presence in F1 in 30 years.”
“We had our ups and downs, starting out with not being able to get enough testing in on Friday during practice. We tried to make up for it on Saturday morning during third practice, but we had an incident with a car colliding with Romain as he was exiting the garage.”
“It started off not too pretty, and then qualifying was not what we wished for, but the team bounced back and we got ready for Sunday. We showed a good race speed and we are ready to go racing.
“In the end, it was all positive. It was hard to get to the positive but, with a lot of work with a lot of hard-working people, we got there. Now the biggest task is to replicate this, which won’t be easy, but for sure we will be trying again.”
Steiner was confident that the team will be able to progress further as long as they kept up with the flow.
“I think we showed that you can start a new team and end up in the midfield,” he added.
“We were not last in Australia, which was one of our goals, and I don’t think we will be last this year. How far we’ve come is a sign that our plan is working.”
The Italian acknowledged the team’s success but chose to remain wary of the team’s performances.
“We are not being arrogant about our early success and we will have our races where we will underperform.”
“Our sixth-place finish in Australia keeps the team going, working very hard and trying to do the best possible job we can. If we continue to do what we did in Melbourne, good results will come. I think our plan is working, but we won’t finish sixth every weekend, so we need to be careful with our expectations.”
“We didn’t complain that we didn’t have to do a pit-stop in Australia, but we will have to do it in Bahrain, for sure,” Steiner concluded, “We will do a lot of things during practice in Bahrain to ensure that we are ready. The focus will be on completing pit-stops this weekend so the team goes into the race confident that they have trained properly.”
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