While everyone’s attention has been focussed on the kerfuffle as to whether or not the new Haas VF-18 is in fact last year’s Ferrari SF70-H in disguise, little has been said about what the American team is doing to ensure that they don’t self implode again.
With Kevin Magnussen running in a strong fourth place in Australia a fortnight ago, closely followed by his team-mate Romain Grosjean in fifth, both cars were then forced out of the race due to similar, self-inflicted errors by the Haas pit crew. In the wake of these errors, team boss Gunther Steiner has now spoken up, saying that changes are being made with personal to help ensure the problem does not happen again.
"Yes we swapped a few positions," Steiner said in Bahrain ahead of Friday’s free practice sessions. "The main reason is not that they did the mistake, but getting their confidence back. If you keep on doing the same and the guy is not confident, the risk that you have a mistake again is high.
"You swap [pit stop] positions, you give them different jobs because you need so many people anyway. That is what we did for this race, and that is what we are doing since yesterday's practice."
But Steiner was quick not to apportion blame on any one individual, and said that he saw any errors made in Melbourne as those of the team as a whole. The idea of getting together now was to get the team’s confidence back and ensure it didn’t happen again.
"We got them all together, and not only the guys who did the pit stop, also the guys who are responsible, the management, because it's all part of the team, and just talked it through. You analyse it and then find a way to do it better for the next race.
"There's no point to dwell on what happened. You cannot fix the past, but you need to look forward and say 'guys, it happened, it shouldn't have happened.' I'm not proud of that, as a team I'm not proud of it. I'm not pointing fingers at one guy. You just need to explain to them 'hey guys, we need to get this better, but as a team,' and everyone went straight in to come up with ideas for how we can avoid situations like this going in to here."
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