Haas team boss Guenther Steiner says Romain Grosjean "cannot keep" crashing and that bad luck was no longer a good enough reason after the Frenchman made contact with his own team-mate at the weekend during the British Grand Prix, before later crashing out of the race.
Grosjean has been involved in an unusually high number of incidents this season, many of his own making, but finally broke free of his 'curse' in Austria where he scored his first points of the season thanks to a fourth-place finish.
However in Britain, Grosjean made contact with Kevin Magnussen and was then involved in an incident with Carlos Sainz which took both drivers out of the grand prix.
On the opening lap incident, Steiner admitted things like that can and do happen, but warned Grosjean that his repeated involvement is becoming "frustrating".
"I’m not happy [about it]. It can happen but it shouldn’t happen," he said. "They need to be better. It’s down to the drivers. Sometimes stuff happens that shouldn’t happen. Romain didn’t do it on purpose, but the drivers need to get better at avoiding this type of situation."
“I wouldn’t call this bad luck," he added. "It’s getting frustrating. He needs to understand he cannot keep doing this.
“We all hope for him [Grosjean] that we are going up and now we are down again in the dumps and we need to get out again.
“We will get out of it, it’s always hard work, but we should put our hard work into scoring points instead of getting up again. We should be up and trying to hit high but at the moment we are using a lot of energy just to get out of the dumps always. Always chasing instead of trying to move ahead.”
When asked at what point do the team call it enough, Steiner hinted that it was close, but he and the team would continue to support Grosjean.
“That’s what I need to do [support Grosjean] because we need to succeed as a team.
“I don’t know where the tipping point is. I’m not there yet. But at some stage, as I said before, we need to stop losing points. And that is the tipping point.
“We cannot keep on doing this. We are now through half the season and we must have lost a lot of points because of our own mistakes. And this is actually not acceptable.”
Discussion about this post