Haas will continue developing its 2023 car to try and find solutions for its current weaknesses, with team principal Guenther Steiner admitting he’s unsure when to focus solely on 2024.
A strong start to the season saw Haas score points in three of the first five races but it hasn’t added to that tally on a Sunday since then, with regular Q3 appearances — and one top-six in a sprint — being followed by challenging race pace. Steiner says some new parts brought to the Hungarian Grand Prix helped move the team forward slightly but that it still has issues it needs to address.
“In Hungary, the result looked worse than it was because we weren’t far from our competitors, but we were still behind,” Steiner said. “It’s not fantastic but it’s the right direction.
“To say whether it was the updates that gave performance or whether it was track specific, it’s very difficult to judge because of how mixed up the teams are getting and how close it is — it’s hard to come to a definitive conclusion on whether an update works. Our upgrade was small as we all know but what it promised to do, it did; it just wasn’t enough.
“Upgrades for this season will also be implemented on next year’s car and that’s why we’ve decided to continue with this year’s car development to really understand our problems and where we need to put effort into making the car better for next year. Right now, we’re developing both cars in parallel, and we don’t really know yet when we switch over only to 2024.”
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Kevin Magnussen finished 17th in Hungary, matching his best result since picking up a point in 10th place in Miami. While he says there are reasons to be optimistic for the future, the Dane expects some more tough races ahead.
“I think we’re getting an understanding,” Magnussen said. One thing is understanding your problem and the next is to find the solution to that problem. I think in general we need some more performance — there are some specific areas that we definitely are struggling in. Hot tires is one of them, but there’s several things that can influence that.
“So I think as a team we need to make a big step forward. I know that there’s some stuff in the pipeline that we can get excited about later on in the year, hopefully, but for now it’s just about being patient and doing every race weekend like you think you have a chance and try to grab any opportunity that you might get.”