Steiner: Designers will ‘forget about overtaking’

Editor

Haas boss Guenther Steiner has said that designers of the 2019 cars will “forget about overtaking” when they start work on next year’s cars.

This comes after the FIA and F1 pushed out some last-minute changes for the 2019 season, in an attempt to improve overtaking.

The new regulations are mainly aerodynamically based, with a simplified front wing to enable to cars to follow each other closely.

However, Steiner is unsure as to whether these proposed changes will have much of an effect on the sport.

“These aero people, they do a study in a week and they say ‘this is what it is’,” Steiner commented.”Then they do a study of two months, and [the results are] completely different because they use every little bit of how the regulation is written to get as much performance.

“That is the phase that everybody is in now, to get the most out of that regulation that was introduced after a three-week study,” he added.

Haas brought significant upgrades to Montreal last weekend, but the future of other upgrades is now in doubt due to the issues caused by the new regulations for 2019.

“We are still looking to find out how much it affects what we are doing,” Steiner continued. “They need to do some runs to see what the new front wing does, then they decide, in the next two to three weeks, if we focus a little bit more on 2019 than the old regs.

“I think we will for obvious reasons – we don’t want to be behind,” the Haas boss added. “There is a point we will need to switch to 2019, and with the limited wind tunnel development time everybody is in the same situation.”