Haas F1 Team are looking forward to 2020 after what has been a frustrating season for the American team.
After a positive first half of the season, Haas quickly fell back in the midfield pecking order which has calumniated in the 2019 car not receiving any improvements since the summer break.
Team principal Guenther Steiner is hopeful that the 2020 car will be good enough to return the team to the heights that it enjoyed in 2018 when it finished fifth in the constructor’s championship.
“It was obviously a tough year for us in our fourth season,” said Steiner. “You learn and, overall, we’re pretty strong anyway. We had to learn some lessons to get better. Next year will be a new book and, hopefully, we go back to the kind of performances we had in 2018.”
Romain Grosjean is already looking forward to the offseason with the hope of bouncing back into 2020.
“I’m going on holiday with my wife. We haven’t had the chance to spend as much time together as we’d have liked. Then after our holiday, we’re into Christmas with the kids and so on. It’s not easy to adjust and to know what to do, this year, the feeling was that from Barcelona, things obviously didn’t go as expected.
“Maybe if we’d reacted earlier, things could have been different, that’s something we’ve learned this year and, as I’ve said, that’s the first time we’ve been in this situation but now we’re much better prepared for the future. I’m very much looking forward to 2020.”
As for Kevin Magnussen 2019 saw him get Haas’s best finish of sixth at the first round in Melbourne and Haas’s best qualifying of fifth place before he was demoted five places for a penalty.
Magnussen thinks that Haas will be better prepared for the following season, with the Dane also doing plenty of training during the off-season.
“I definitely think so. I think the team has learned a lot this year, not in terms of results, but in terms of performance. Overall, the team has done a really good job this year and really stepped up. Obviously, we’ve had a difficult car, but that’s really how the team has proved itself this year, in terms of how we’ve worked with the car and worked around the problems we’ve had.”
“I won’t be taking time off from physical training. It’s part of my everyday life. I think it’s really refreshing to get into a nice rhythm without being disrupted by travelling and races which, although we love racing, in terms of training, it’s not ideal.”
