Both Kevin Magnussen and Romain Grosjean admitted it was ‘heartbreaking’ for the Haas F1 Team to suffer a double retirement in the Australian Grand Prix, with the team losing a good number of points in the process.
Magnussen was running fourth ahead of his pit stop only for one of his tyres not to be fitted properly, forcing him to pull off the circuit at turn four, but despite the disappointment, they will regroup and come back fighting.
“It’s a very tough one to swallow for the whole team,” admitted Magnussen. “To have both cars not finishing – having been in such good positions and with so much anticipation – it’s just heartbreaking to finish like that.
“We’ll get on top again. We’ll fight back. I’m beyond disappointed right now, but we’ll get over it.”
Team-mate Grosjean suffered the same fate just two laps later, with the Frenchman feeling he would have been able to pull away from Magnussen had he been able to get ahead of the Dane, but the Frenchman says there are plenty of positives to take away from Australia despite the pit stop dramas.
“We had a good car all weekend,” said Grosjean. “I was happy with our low- and high-fuel pace. I had great pace today, and I’m sure I could have stayed a bit more with the frontrunners if I’d been in front of Kevin early in the race.
“We’ll now analyze everything and work out what happened exactly. We’ll come back stronger as we always do. It’s a lot of points lost today, but if we can repeat that performance over and over, we’re going to forget this very quickly.”