Steiner: Haas haven’t listened to drivers enough

Haas principal Guenther Steiner admits the team should have listened more to the feedback given to them by their drivers in 2019.

It has been a frustrating campaign for the American outfit who are all the way down in P9 in the Constructors’ Championship, scoring only 28 points so far this season.

Both Kevin Magnussen and Romain Grosjean have struggled to extract performance from the VF-19 which has suffered from a narrow operating window, and the team have accepted that there is no light at the end of the tunnel yet.

Haas introduced their first major upgrade at the Spanish Grand Prix, but Grosjean quickly wanted to go back to the Australia-spec car which he started the season with.

But it wasn’t until the British GP several months later that he got his wish, with the team now running what they describe as a “hybrid” version of the VF-19, based on the Australia-spec.

Magnussen has also been highly vocal about the poor year, and Steiner admits that Haas have failed to listen to their drivers enough when it came to developing their car throughout the season.

“I don’t want to go into the specifics of technical stuff, 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 told Crash.net.

“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.”

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