Haas still has a clear direction for what it wants to do with its 2024 car concept despite a mid-season upgrade not delivering an uptick in results this year.
Guenther Steiner’s team scored points in three of the first five races and managed another three points in the Sprint in Austria, but since then scored just a solitary point in the remaining 13 rounds. Haas developed a new car concept that it first ran in Austin but did not score a point with the upgrade, and Steiner admitted there were too many limitations to trigger a clear turnaround.
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“Absolutely [it’s been a tougher year than expected],” Steiner told RACER. “I think we started off respectfully, scoring points in the first races, always around the points positions, and then we just fell back and back and back until we were at the end of the grid.
“Very weird as well that we can qualify good but we cannot keep our tires working for the whole race – we have got big degradation, and the reason behind it is we couldn’t find any performance in the car. We tried to develop more than any other year before, we did every wind tunnel session, everything possible, but we just couldn’t find any performance.
“That drove us to change the concept of the car. We were the last ones left on the concept that we started off with last year, and we just had to change concept and that’s what we introduced in Austin. But when you introduce a new concept of car, you have your own restrictions because things like the side impact structure you cannot change anymore.
“So we tried to do our best, but the only good thing to say there is that in six weeks we developed a car which has got the same performance as a car that we developed for one and a half years. So obviously we have done something right, and we just now work very hard on next year’s car. That was the focus based on the concept we introduced in Austin.”
While Steiner jokes that Haas only needs a short amount of time to develop another new car, he says the concept has still been proven to be the right direction to follow in 2024.
“Six weeks and then we should be ahead of everybody!” he said. “I wish it was like this. We started the new car development actually before we worked on the Austin upgrade, so we were going in that direction anyway and that is what we are doing. It’s just tough to play catch-up.
“I think what we learned is that concept we can make it work, we just need to find performance in the concept. It’s not like there is something we don’t understand. We can find a balance with the car and all that good stuff, so we have got an understanding, we just need to find more performance, which is basically finding more downforce.”