Romain Grosjean is refusing to write off the Singapore Grand Prix weekend just yet despite a very disappointing day for the Haas F1 Team on Friday where pace was hard to find for both drivers.
The Frenchman, who was confirmed to be a Haas driver for a fifth consecutive season on Thursday, ended a respectable twelfth in the first session at the Marina Bay Street Circuit but down in a lowly seventeenth in the evening session, a session where conditions are closer to what will be expected during Saturday’s Qualifying session and Sunday’s race.
Grosjean admits there is a lot of work to do to find the kind of pace needed to be a contender for the top ten, but he knows that it can only take something small to turn around the whole situation so it is imperative not to give up.
“It hasn’t been easy today,” admitted Grosjean. “We know Singapore is a tough circuit and it can expose your weaknesses. We’ve tried our best today but there’s obviously some work we need to do for tomorrow and Sunday.
“At the minute it doesn’t look like being an easy one. Saying that, sometimes you find the little things that make a big chunk of lap time, especially on a street circuit. I’m not writing everything off, we’re just going to work hard and hopefully come back stronger tomorrow.”
Team-mate Kevin Magnussen ended sixteenth in the first session and nineteenth in the evening’s running, with the Dane also acknowledging just how difficult it was for Haas on Friday. He hopes the team can solve the issues they were having so they can be a contender for the top ten in both Qualifying and the race.
“It was a little bit difficult today,” said Magnussen. “We weren’t very fast, lots of sliding around, we don’t look fantastic. You never know, maybe things will change tomorrow, we’ve seen that before – but that’s all we can hope for.
“We’ll obviously do our best to see if we can find the issues, but at the moment it doesn’t look great. It’s very hot here, we need to cool the car a lot, so the aero spec is a bit different because of that. There are a lot of variables, a lot of things that could play into this lack of performance.
“It’s not easy to say these things, but we’ll work hard tonight.”
Team Principal Guenther Steiner says they will be looking into just why the pace was not there with either VF-19 on Friday, with the hope that they can turn things around swiftly on Saturday and fight for a respectable position on the grid.
“Not an ideal day, as we can see,” said Steiner. “We just need to work now to find some solutions for tomorrow. FP1, it’s always difficult to judge anything anyway, because of all the different temperatures between that and the race.
“Then FP2, it just wasn’t good. We need to look into it and hopefully come up with something for tomorrow. So, FP3 hopefully we learn something, then have a respectable qualifying.”
