Haas boss Steiner “baffled” by ‘strangest-ever’ F1 car

Guenther Steiner says he is “baffled” by the performance of Haas’ 2019 Formula 1 challenger, which he has described as “the strangest car I have ever worked with”.

In a bid to get on top of its recent performance inconsistencies, Haas has split its car set-ups for the last two grands prix in Great Britain and Germany, with Romain Grosjean running a Melbourne-spec VF-19 and Kevin Magnussen using the latest upgraded version.

Despite claiming just its second double points finish of the 2019 season during a chaotic, rain affected race at Hockenheim, Haas was left none the wiser as to which car is the way to go moving forwards.

Asked if the comparison had provided any answers, Steiner replied: “We are not through on that one.

“If we were that good to have the comparison already we would be quite a good team. This takes days to look into.

“But we did want to do it to see if we see anything different in the comparison, but it’s too early to say. We do have the data.

“If we had fully understood it we would know what to do next,” he added. "We’re still to understand where we are with it. This is the strangest car I have ever worked with.

“You can qualify sixth, which in reality is eighth, I know that, but we qualify fifth sometimes and then in the race you just drop off to second last. It’s amazing you know?

“There hasn’t been many times a car like this has been around. I don’t remember anything like this and therefore it is even more difficult because you cannot even go back.

“If we are always slow… but in qualifying Kevin without the lock-up would have made it into Q3 pretty easy, but then again in the race we end up being slow. I’m baffled.”

Steiner added the American squad is still at a loss to explain its tyre-related performance issues which have hampered much of its 2019 campaign.

“It’s how the car influences the tyre. But for sure I think it’s still when we get the tyre to work, we are in it, and we just need to understand what makes it work and what doesn’t.

“We know that the window of the tyre is small where it works, that won’t change, so we need to find out why we are dropping out sometimes and sometimes not.”

He added Haas is not “100% sure” whether it will continue its back-to-back experiments at this weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix.