Haas F1 got both cars into the top 10 in qualifying for the first time in Suzuka as the team put in the best performance of its debut season.
Romain Grosjean earned eighth and Esteban Gutierrez 10th, but it could have been even better. In Q3 a DRS glitch cost Grosjean the precious time that would have put him in seventh, ahead of Sergio Perez. He would then have gained a further spot from Sebastian Vettel’s grid penalty to start sixth.
“To get both Romain and Esteban into Q3 was one of the targets for this year and we’ve now achieved it,” said team boss Guenter Steiner. “If you’re in your first year and you get two cars in there by merit, it’s fantastic. Hats off to the team and to the drivers. Tomorrow we’re going to try to do a good race and, for sure, it’s possible now to get into the points.”
Grosjean was left frustrated after the DRS problem left him on the same time as Perez, meaning an improvement of just 0.001s would have put him sixth.
“There has been a small glitch in the setup between my upshift and my DRS,” he said. “And that cost me three or four hundredths on the straight line. And that would have been enough to be in front of Perez, and start sixth in the race. But it was a good lap. It wasn’t as hard as Q2, because we had only one attempt, and you just don’t want to go straight into Turn One, but generally I got it right when it needed to.”
Grosjean said it was a good weekend for the new team: “It’s a great performance again. Behind the scenes there’s a lot of things we can improve and do better to go faster, but when we put the car together, and we have all the parts together and things working, it’s a great performance.
“Generally for a long time I’ve said when we put the things together, it’s going to be there. Eventually we did it today, even though there’s a few things we could do have done better, but here we got the car that I like, more or less.
“I think the biggest change was the new front wing, which is very positive for the future, because it’s something that we’ve developed in the wind tunnel, from the comments of the drivers. It’s doing what it’s supposed to do, and it shows that every time we brought upgrades. So I have a lot of faith in the team in the future, and the way we’ve been working.”
