Guenther Steiner will seek talks with Formula 1 race director Charlie Whiting after feeling the conditions that qualifying for the Italian Grand Prix began in were far too dangerous.
The team principal of the Haas F1 Team watched Romain Grosjean aquaplane on the start and finish straight and hit the wall on the inside of the circuit, and the subsequent red flag to recover his VF17 lasted two and a half hours while they waited on the weather to improve.
Grosjean was just a passenger in the accident, and Steiner will now seek talks with Whiting to try and prevent a repeat in the future if conditions are potentially dangerous.
“I cannot do anything, the race director has to do something, not me,” said Steiner to Motorsport.com. “We are going to speak about it.
“I know his job is massively difficult, to find a happy compromise and not to make happen what has today is by no means easy. I cannot do anything, the race director has to do something, not me.
“But we need to get better. Romain was not in a corner [when he crashed], this is not to do with driving talent or anything. There was a lot of drivers who mentioned that it was too wet, [and that] you cannot see. They shouldn’t have started it, in my opinion.”
With Grosjean crashing and Kevin Magnussen being eliminated in the first session of qualifying, Steiner insists that they are not making excuses for their performance during qualifying, feeling they were just not good enough in the conditions they were presented with.
“Romain went off on his own – I don’t blame anybody for that,” said Steiner. “But if it wouldn’t have been him, somebody behind him would have gone off.
“I don’t want to find that as an excuse for where we are where we are because we are grown ups and we need to live with that. But it isn’t ideal because something can happen.
“[The result] is our own doing, we were just not good enough. We were just not on the case enough, we aren’t as good as the others, they managed this situation better.”
