Guenther Steiner believes the big teams will still have the advantage despite losing the same amount of track time due to the weather conditions during the first pre-season test at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya last week.
The Team Principal of the Haas F1 Team says the resources the leading teams have mean the loss of track time can be made up faster, and away from the track in their simulators, and it leaves the likes of Haas on the back foot in comparison.
“I think you can equate it like this,” Steiner is quoted of saying by Racer. “The big teams do a lot more work on testing, so they lose as much as us because with all their resources they do more in testing.
“But for sure to get to Melbourne always the smaller ones are always hurt more than the bigger ones because they just have more resources. It’s normal, whatever happens.
“The big teams will always have an advantage. They can just do much more at home. They gather the basic data of the car, which you can still be at with data, and then do the development… instead of doing it on the car, do it on the simulator.”
Steiner is hopeful next weeks second pre-season test in Spain will have more representative and favourable weather conditions, which would allow his team to gather as much data as possible before the first race of the season at the end of the month in Australia.
“I’m actually positive next week will be a better week,” said Steiner. “It seems to be there will be no rain, the temperature goes up to normal – 16 degrees, 17 degrees – and then you can go back to normal.”
