Steiner adamant Haas will learn from mistakes

Mark Scott
Guenther Steiner says increasing the budget cap would cause problems for teams.

Guenther Steiner says increasing the budget cap would cause problems for teams.

Haas team principal, Guenther Steiner, has said the team have “learned our lesson” from a dismal 2019 Formula 1 campaign.

After finishing in the lofty heights of P5 in 2018, the American outfit were only kept off bottom spot in the Constructors’ Championship by lowly Williams last season.

There is a pre-season expectation of another challenging year for Haas but, if that does indeed happen, it won’t be by making the same errors as 2019.

“I’m taking things on board,” Steiner told Motorsport.com.

“We are not going to make mistakes like last season. I say definitely yes to that. We understood that, we are working a little bit different on it.

“There can still be mistakes.

“But I think if I would say we didn’t learn our lesson and be stupid like last year, I mean, that wouldn’t make me feel great, saying, ‘No, I ignore everything that I learned last year, I just keep on going head down like we did last year.’

“No, we learned our lesson. We are humble, and we’ll try to be like two years ago again. Let’s speak about two years ago.”

Steiner is encouraged by the feedback given by Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen, but was cautious in making any predictions for the year ahead.

“They made the right noises,” he added.

“Obviously a driver is never happy, and especially if you think what happened to us last year. I mean, we were very happy with it, then it is ended up not to be good.

“So everybody’s very cautious. We are very cautious in our prediction for this season, because we don’t want to be, ‘It’s all good, it’s all good,’ then fall hard.

“So we do a diligent job and try to do the best and see where it takes us. But that’s happened every year, just last year, the developments didn’t work. So we ended up where we ended up.

“We are always very cautious in what we do. We are a little bit of a dark horse because we play it different. We change around a lot of things, normally here, there is a pattern in it, and we change the pattern a little bit.

“No, we are always cautious what we do and we just want to make sure that we’ve got we can use it, and come as best prepared as possible to Australia.”

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