Haas F1 Team Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen finished fifteenth and seventeenth after a busy day at Suzuka Circuit.
For only the fifth in Formula One history, qualifying was held on race day as all Saturday activity was suspended due to the Typhoon Hagibis.
Grosjean had a strong qualifying performance, advancing to Q3 and earning ten
Magnussen, on the other hand, had an accident during the Q1 session which prevented him from recording a qualifying time.
With keeping up with tyre management, Grosjean advanced as high as twelf
Compared to Magnussen who was as high as fifteenth on lap 30 before also losing ground.
Romain Grosjean said: “Well,it wasn’t as good as we wanted. The start was terrible,I don’t know why.”
“Honestly, I had two really good overtakes on [George] Russell and [Antonio] Giovinazzi around the outside of turn one and two- both times. That was the highlight of my race.”
“After that it was just managing tires, we just didn’t have the pace in the race, which was a bit of a shame.”
“We’ll keep working and see if the next race will be good for us,” he continued.
Magnussen said: “I started last and got up to eleventh, which I was fairly happy about, but after
“It wasn’t terrible in terms of tyres and pace, not like previous races at least.”
“If we’d hooked everything up, and if I’d started where I should have, and made as good a start as I did, then I’d obviously have been in a much better position.”
He continued: “We just didn’t have the pace today.”
Guenther Steiner, Team Principal said: “This morning qualifying for Romain wasn’t so bad, he got into Q3 which was a little bit the highlight of the day.”
“Kevin crashed on his fast lap, he was doing a very fast lap – the car can do one good lap performance wise.”
“As soon as we go racing though, we fall out of the tyre window and we end up like we did today.”
“It is pretty frustrating but not unexpected, it’s not like we were surprised.”
“We just need to try to do our best for the rest of the season to get a little bit out of the car, and mainly learn not to do the same mistakes for next year,” he said.
With only four races remaining on the 2019 FIA Formula One World Championship calendar, maybe Haas Formula 1 Team will learn more about their car.
