Despite the Haas F1 Team boss being optimistic, Günther Steiner admits Haas still has these two problems. The Haas team seems to have made progress for the Miami Grand Prix with an update to the underbody.
Not only was Kevin Magnussen able to score another important point at the home race with tenth place in the race, but the pace in the free practice sessions and the Dane’s qualifying with fourth place on the grid were also convincing.
Update worked
“It seems to work,” says team boss Günther Steiner about the update on the underbody, but at the same time the Italian South Tyrolean emphasises that there is still room for improvement on the VF-23.
Haas is struggling with two problems in particular: tyre wear on the one hand and sensitive aerodynamics on the other, which suffer more in traffic than with other teams.
“We have to figure out what we need to do to be more stable in traffic, so the tyres don’t wear so much in traffic,” he explains. “Because the guys also say they can see that the other cars don’t struggle as much as our car in traffic, so the engineers in the aero department will work on that.”
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Haas with highest tyre wear of all teams
Looking at the bare figures provided to us by technology company PACETEQ, we can see that the Haas VF-23 is the car with the highest tyre wear over the average of the first five races of the 2023 season. Together with Alfa Romeo, they are in last place with a season average wear of 0.067 seconds per lap.
In comparison, front-runner Red Bull wears tyres by just 0.026 seconds per lap, meaning Haas’ tyre degradation is more than twice as high. The effects of the second problem, turbulence in the “dirty air”, could also be observed in Miami.
Hard-medium strategy not working
Seven of the ten Formula One teams split their strategy on the Florida coast, either medium-hard or hard-medium. Max Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton, Esteban Ocon, Yuki Tsunoda, Lance Stroll, Guanyu Zhou and Nico Hülkenberg belonged to the latter variant.
Except for the Emmericher and Zhou, all of these drivers were able to make up many places in their second stint on the medium tyre, in some cases with overtaking manoeuvres on the track. However, Zhou was too far behind, so there was nobody to overtake, while Hülkenberg cut his teeth on Alexander Albon, although the Williams driver was on old hard tyres.
So it was only P15 in the race for Hülkenberg, although he spent a large part of the first stint together with Lewis Hamilton, who finished sixth, and Yuki Tsunoda. The Japanese driver in the AlphaTauri ended up eleventh.
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Steiner announces update for Imola
“We will get some parts for Imola, some front wing flaps, not a complete wing,” Steiner said when asked about the next Haas upgrades, after all there is still room for improvement.
“I think we just have to do a good job there,” Steiner adds about the upcoming race in Italy. “Again, it’s like everywhere. I think we’re doing pretty well considering where we were last year and where we are this year, but everything has to be perfect and you have to have a bit of luck, otherwise it’s difficult to score points this year.”
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