Romain Grosjean could only manage fifteenth on the grid for the Hungarian Grand Prix on another difficult day for the Haas F1 Team, with the Frenchman feeling that both he and team-mate Kevin Magnussen needed to overdrive in order to maximise their results.
Grosjean has been complaining of both understeer and oversteer on his VF17 this weekend, with troubles straight from the start, with Friday pretty much a write-off for Haas as a result of his issues and the lack of running in the second car due to Antonio Giovinazzi crashing early in free practice 1.
The Frenchman thought the weekend in Hungary would be similar to that in Austria where he enjoyed a strong sixth position, but the team have been nowhere near where they need to be this weekend, only advancing to Q3 by 0.010 seconds, although he does move up to fourteenth on the grid when Daniil Kvyat takes his grid penalty.
“I guess it’s the best we could do,” said Grosjean. “We both had to overdrive the car in Q1 and I managed to get through to Q2 where I tried really, really hard on the last lap. I couldn’t quite get better than 15th.
“When we lose all of Friday with one car – actually we can say we lost all of Friday with my car as well – we just had too many problems. Things were going up and down and we couldn’t really get anything, so it’s very, very difficult.
“We need to improve as a team and get the car better from the first lap in FP1. If we’re getting decent lap times there we can move forward. Here, we’ve just been struggling. I crashed on the first lap in FP1, so we’ve been in a very difficult position.
“I thought this would be the same as Austria and we’d be generating temperature in the tyres. It’s all related to tyres and we’re just not working them properly. What is the key? I don’t know, but it’s something that’s not quite working.”
