Steiner: Haas should have listened to its drivers more

Haas Formula 1 chief Gunther Steiner has conceded the team should have listened to drivers Kevin Magnussen and Romain Grosjean more in dictating the direction of the VF-19 car’s development through the 2019 season.

Haas currently sits ninth in the constructors’ championship after a difficult campaign that has seen both Magnussen and Grosjean struggle to work with a car that has offered a narrow and often unpredictable working performance window with this year’s tyres.

The team has tried a number of different solutions, including reverting to the Australia-spec car used before F1’s summer break, and will run a ‘hybrid’ setup through the remainder of the season.

Grosjean had been asking to return to the Australia-spec car as early as the first race the updated package was introduced in Spain at the beginning of May, but only got the chance to do so at the British Grand Prix two months later.

Looking back on Haas’s season so far over the Japanese Grand Prix weekend, team boss Steiner admitted it should have listened to the feedback from its drivers more.

“I don’t want to go into the specifics of technical stuff,e but we should have listened a little bit more to the drivers when they gave their opinion about what the car is doing and whatnot,” Steiner said.

“And sometimes listen more to drivers than look at numbers. That’s what we have to learn out of this.

“Now I think we need to get what drivers say correlated with what the numbers say and get an understanding so we can move forward.

“We would have done a lot different from Barcelona onwards.”

Haas has scored points in just two of the last 11 races, causing it to drop behind its midfield rivals to second-from-bottom in the teams’ standings with four races to go.