McLaren and Renault are Lucky: Haas

The Haas F1 team believe that their rivals Renault and McLaren have been “lucky” so far in the 2018 season.

Haas were extremely competitive in Australia despite wheel gun woes. But they are languishing in seventh in the constructors’ championship at the moment.

Besides the nightmarish Australian Grand Prix, they only managed a single point for Kevin Magnussen in China.

In 3 races, Danish driver Kevin Magnussen has scored all 11 points for the team. The American marquee are 14 points behind fifth-placed Renault and a further 17 behind fourth-placed McLaren.

Team principal Gunther Steiner admitted that the Melbourne double retirement cost them dearly.

“The first three races we were always there,” he said.

“At the moment it’s between us, Renault and McLaren for fourth. I think the picture is quite clear as it stands at the moment and I hope we can finally pull one off because the other ones are getting lucky and we are getting unlucky.

“But we need to make our own luck, to be honest. Australia wasn’t great and otherwise we would be where we should be.”

He also said that they were unlucky in China with the timing of the Safety Car. According to him, they had the pace for seventh with Magnussen and ninth with Romain Grosjean.

Haas’ case was not helped by the fact that they were out of fresh softer compound tyres. As a result, their strategy went awry and they struggled to get back up to speed. When racing resumed neither car could generate sufficient tyre temperature.

Steiner believes that these tyre problems are worth investigating. He expects Haas to stay in the development race in 2018 instead of fading away after a strong start. This has been a common occurrence in its past F1 campaigns so far.

“We need to keep on doing what we’re doing,” he said.

“Every race we learn more about the tyres and we build up our knowledge base of the tyres from this year, and we have planned for upgrades on the car.

“Our whole plan this year is different from last year.

“Last year, we knew we wouldn’t have many upgrades because we decided early in the season that we wouldn’t bring that many updates as we turned our focus to next year’s car.

“But this year, we made the decision early in the season that we will bring more updates.

“So, it’s down to how good are our updates, but also how good are the updates of the opposition?”