Haas F1 is better prepared for second season, says team principal
Haas F1 boss Guenther Steiner says that the U.S.-owned team is much better prepared for its second season than it was for its first.
The received wisdom is that the second year is harder for any new team because it has to start to develop its new car while still busy racing the first. Steiner acknowledges that is some truth to that theory, but insists that the team has prepared well for the challenge.
“This year I could see that we were better prepared, which is natural because we’ve already done one year,” said Steiner. “We know a lot more, which just comes from experience. We’ve got one year of experience. All our partners, Ferrari and Dallara, they were better prepared, again, because they had one year of experience. All in all, it went a lot smoother.
“I wouldn’t say that normally the second season is harder than the first one, but a lot of people predicted that we would have big issues. But they predicted as well before the first year that we would have big issues, and we didn’t have them. The preparation was a lot better for us this year than last year, so I hope also the performance of the car is better.
“Anyway, testing went very well, and I hope we’ve got a little bit of luck, as well, in the first race, like we had last year, and can take points home. We know the second year is harder and so we tried to prepare as best as we could for it. Let’s wait a few races and then see what we’ve achieved.”
Regarding what was learned in testing he added: “It went pretty well. We did a lot of laps, which is good. I think we ran a good pace. Some days were better than others, as normal in testing. All in all, I was very happy with the reliability of the car, and also the pace. We just need to keep the pace consistent, not like in testing, where it was on and off a little bit.”
Steiner stressed that good reliability will help the team to log early points, as it did last year.
“Very important because as we saw in the test, a lot of teams can have issues. We were reliable, very reliable for the first test and, knock on wood, we stay like that in the first race, just because there is a chance to score points if others have problems.”
