GUNTHER STEINER

HAAS TEAM PRINCIPAL

What do you take away from this race? Quite a few positives. We were able to race a little bit more than last week. And I think we’ve made some progress with the car. The drivers are not unhappy with the balance and the handling of the car. We need to find a little bit more speed, but otherwise we didn’t have any issues in the race. So I think enough positives to go forward and say we made progress from last week. We still have a long road in front of us, but at least we are back on the track. We went off track last weekend with the issues we had. So, all in all, not a bad day for us.

How happy were you to see how well behaved your drivers were today?

It was about time! It took a few years too long, and a few crashes too many. For sure they’re never happy [to swap positions]. But it’s actually very difficult on the pitwall to manage it, because we do not really see what’s going on – we don’t know about how much they push and how much they don’t push. It isn’t easy for us to make the calls. But at least they behaved well and we didn’t get too many arguments. Hopefully it stays like this.

Where are you in the pecking order?

I don’t know at the moment. On tracks like this, I think the pecking order is we are in the latter half of the field. But I want to see how we’re doing at tracks such as the Hungaroring – slower tracks, basically, where we don’t have the long straights. Because I think we can gain something there. At Barcelona in testing we were quicker than we were here, compared to other people. But again, we need to go at least to Hungary and do a good race to see where we end up. But it won’t be an easy year for us.