GUNTHER STEINER

HAAS TEAM PRINCIPAL

Romain Grosjean called the race one of the worst of his career. How can you explain that after his strong practice pace?

We know we haven’t got the best car. And having the best car one day and the worst car the other day, I think we need to take it a little bit with a pinch of salt, you know.

We need to look at why we lost so much performance from Friday to Sunday – the lap times on Friday, they were genuine. And today we could only lap two seconds slower than Friday. So that is very strange. We need to go through the aero data and see if we can find something.

Are there any positives you can take?

I would say today we executed, especially with Kevin [Magnussen], as good as we could. We tried a different strategy and the strategy worked, even if there was no result. But you need to do something.

The execution was fine, it’s just like we haven’t got the pace at the moment. The car hasn’t got the pace, so this is what we are faced with. But otherwise, the whole weekend, everything was done pretty well. We [started] the weekend by changing the engine [on Grosjean’s car] on Friday night and then having to break the curfew. We just need to keep our heads down and keep on working.

Do you believe the situation can improve? What you can look at are things like the change in the engine regulations for the next race, hopefully. That maybe makes some difference or should level everything out a little bit. And the rest, we just try always to get the best out of the car with the set-up. That’s the only thing we can do at the moment. I’m very, very conscious of that.