The Haas F1 Team go into this weekend’s French Grand Prix on the back of their most successful weekend in years, after finishing sixth and eighth at the recent Austrian Grand Prix.
Mick Schumacher claimed sixth-place for the team, in what was his best finish yet in his Formula 1 career. Kevin Magnussen finished eighth after also collecting two-points in the Austrian Sprint race.
Team Principal Guenther Steiner, believes it was “almost” the “perfect weekend” at the Red Bull Ring, and that it’s a culmination of all the hard work taking place at the American team.
“I’m very happy about it but I’m very happy about it for the team because I’ve told them that they need to believe in themselves because we’ve done it before and we will do it again, and we have so it’s a very good result.
“I think we have to be careful about getting too over enthusiastic for the next races, so we’re not thinking that this will keep continuing easily – this is very hard work from a lot of people. We will do the best we can and hopefully we can get some more points and have quite a relaxed summer break.
“I would say it’s an almost perfect weekend, there’s always margin to do better in racing until you win everything, but nobody wins everything all of the time. It was a very good weekend and everything was executed as best as we could, there were no real mistakes, nothing done wrong. Every little step can be better so we move up and one day, hopefully coming soon, we’ll get a podium. To pull this together it’s a bunch of people working hard, there’s no secret, it’s just everybody doing their job.”
As a result of finishing sixth and eighth at Austria, the team moved up to seventh-place in the Constructors’ Championship. The American side moved ahead of Scuderia AlphaTauri by seven-points, leaving Steiner both happy but also not wanting to “get ahead” of himself.
“I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but if we can keep seventh, or to end up sixth – it would be nice. I think anything above sixth will be very difficult because the other teams are very good and they’re a little bit far ahead, if we can keep on going as we are going, obviously we will not have the perfect race weekends like the last two with both cars scoring points, but we just need to keep on working hard and maybe we can achieve sixth. First of all, we need to make sure that we stay seventh.”
Looking ahead to this weekend’s race at Circuit Paul Ricard, Steiner explained that “motivation is very high” at Haas. The Haas boss is targeting more points this weekend, with the VF22 appearing to be strong at every circuit.
“For sure, motivation is very high within the team after two weekends like we had in Silverstone and Austria. Our car is pretty good everywhere, I think our weakest point is high-speed tracks like those in Jeddah and Baku and coming up in Spa and Monza. I’m very confident that if we execute well, we can have points again. I don’t know how many but the reliability in the last two races was good and hopefully it will stay good for the next events before the summer.”