Kevin Magnussen says he wants Haas to understand its current tyre weakness as opposed to merely putting in a strong display at this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix.
Haas performed strongly at Barcelona pre-season and followed it up with an eye-catching display in Australia, enabling Magnussen to spearhead the midfield battle.
But since then its race pace has deteriorated and it has not scored a point since Magnussen’s sixth-place in Australia.
Haas has pinpointed its problems to its use of Pirelli’s notoriously sensitive rubber, with team boss Guenther Steiner expanding on the issue in the wake of his team’s disappointing Baku display.
Magnussen, though, says Haas can only be happy if it can rectify the VF-19’s weakness in order to avoid the issue recurring long-term.
“It will be good to come back and kind of reset and do a direct comparison to winter testing,” he said.
“It seemed to be working well in winter testing in both low and high fuel running so it will be interesting to see.
“I can’t say we understand the full picture yet.
“We might find which is working, I don’t know, and in a way, I hope don’t just find ourselves working and in the window because we really want to understand.
“What I really want is to understand the problem and find some answers so that we can build on that at other races. But we will see what happens.”
Magnussen added: “I would say in low fuel in qualifying we are certainly up there [in the midfield], it’s not that we are lacking downforce… It can only be a tyre problem when you are that fast in qualifying and then not have the pace in the races.
“Only Williams has been slower than us in the last couple of races and at all the races we have been reasonably good in qualifying, and the only thing that can play such a big part in that is tyres.”
Haas currently holds eighth position in the Constructors’ Championship.
Discussion about this post