Kevin Magnussen feels that his Haas F1 Team are in a good place this weekend at the Hungaroring despite having what he felt was a ‘messy day’, with the Dane finishing tenth and thirteenth across the two practice sessions on Friday.
With team-mate Romain Grosjean finishing seventh in both sessions, Magnussen knows the pace is there in the VF-18 this weekend, and it is up to him to have a clean session on Saturday morning to put things right after being unable to maximise his potential on Friday.
Magnussen finished two-tenths of a second behind his team-mate in the morning session but was more than eight-tenths of a second down on him in the afternoon, but despite this he has confidence that Haas will be strong this weekend in Hungary as they bid to regain their fifth place in the Constructors’ Championship from the Sahara Force India F1 Team and close the gap to the Renault Sport Formula One Team in fourth.
“We had a bit of a messy day, but the car is feeling good and the pace is there, so I think we just wait for tomorrow and work on the things that we see on the data, the feedback, and things should be ok,” said Magnussen.
“Some days you just have a lot of traffic and we had some wrong switch headings, little problems that keep you from putting the lap time on the board, but still you get a feeling and you get pieces of the data that you can look into and improve from there.
“We’ll do a bit more tomorrow and, hopefully, get a clean session where we can verify the things we’re going to change for tomorrow, which won’t be much because I think it was okay today. So, we’re in a good place. Very happy.”
