Guenther Steiner insists his Haas F1 Team will learn from their experience during the Singapore Grand Prix, especially with the brake-by-wire problem that ended Romain Grosjean’s race before it began.
The team principal is overseeing measures to ensure the problem does not return, and insists the morale of the team, which took a hit with the issues and failure to score points in Singapore, will be high again heading into this weekend’s Malaysian Grand Prix.
“We analyse what we’ve done and find out what went wrong and try to put measures in place so it doesn’t happen again,” said Steiner. “On the morale side, I think the guys were a little bit down after Singapore, but I think if you are a real racer you always try hard again and never give up. I think everyone is up for it and rule No. 1 for Malaysia is to make up for what we didn’t do in Singapore.
“Sunday night after the race in Singapore, we took the gearbox off and it was as simple as reconnecting it. We’ll manufacture a device in Europe to be sent via airfreight to Malaysia to ensure the connector doesn’t fall off again. It will be fitted on the car before we get on track in Malaysia.”
Steiner is hopeful of finding more about the updated front wing that they decided not to run in Singapore due to it being difficult to gauge around the street circuit, and should they have a normal weekend in Malaysia, they will have enough data to determine whether it is worth keeping on the car going forward.
“We didn’t run the new front wing because the drivers weren’t sure how to set the car up with the new wing,” said Steiner. “We need to re-test it in Malaysia. It’s very difficult to test something in Singapore due to the walls.
“The readings of the data are sometimes different because you get different aero data when you’re running between two walls. The brakes ducts all worked. They will be on for the rest of the year with no problem.
“If we can get back to a normal weekend routine and get through the program, we can get the data we need. If not, we can’t do it properly. In Singapore, Romain stopped after FP1 and Esteban [Gutierrez]’s focus was more on the tyres and not the front wing, so we didn’t have the data.
“In Malaysia, if we run a normal routine, we can test the wings back to back and get the data. In Singapore, we didn’t have that luxury because we had to send Esteban out to get data on the tyres.”
