The brake issues that plagued the Haas F1 Team during the 2016 F1 season have so far remained an issue for the American squad, as they found during the first pre-season test session, at the Circuit de Catalunya-Barcelona this week.
Despite performing strongly across the four days, with some fast lap times being posted by its drivers Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen, Haas are still struggling to fully understand the Brembo brakes and pads.
Team Principal Guenther Steiner confirmed that although the problem is intermittent, it is not helping the drivers to feel comfortable with the car, and they need to get on top of the issue as soon as possible.
“We are not completely done with the brakes. Our biggest problem is the inconsistency.
“So again, we have sometimes a brake that the drivers are really happy with, and then we get a set which we are not happy with, and we lose a lot of time.
“It is not only the time to change it, because the driver loses the confidence. Then, when you put the next one on, he needs to get into a state again that he is confident about what he gets, so we are not done with that yet.
“We had good brakes on Tuesday and good brakes today but yesterday that was one of our problems.”
Having experienced the same issues last year as well, Haas have already tested with a different brake manufacturer, new supplier Carbone Industrie (CI), to see if they would be a better fit for their car set up, but they have not investigated them fully enough yet to determine whether they are a better option than Brembo.
“We haven’t tested them [CI] enough to know if they are consistent or not. We did a test last year but we haven’t come to a conclusion.
“We need to test them for this year, because we were late with the sign off and we have to produce new brakes because the discs are thicker and we haven’t got them yet.
“We will test them. We just don’t know exactly when or which race we will have them on.”
