American team Haas is bringing special upgrades to the Canadian Grand Prix after intentionally postponing its first major upgrade for the 2018 car.
Many believe Haas is mimicking Ferrari’s 2017 aero style, and the outfit has seen strong pace since the beginning of the season. But due to some first lap incidents, it has not been able to reap better rewards.
They managed to get the sixth place in the Spanish GP although they did not bring any new upgrades for the race.
The team choose to bring a significantly bigger package to Montreal rather than Barcelona, team principal Gunther Steiner admitted.
“We’ve got quite significant changes,” he said. “Front wing, floor, and all the bargeboard area, we’ve made those updates.
“Obviously, their aim is to go faster, to gain us speed.
“A lot of people brought their upgrades to Spain. We decided to bring them to Canada to have a little bit more time because we’re still a small team and cannot react as quickly as the big ones.”
Because of structural issues, the American outfit was forced to remove the bargeboard from Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen’s car at Monaco.
Both the Haas cars also experienced parts breaking off during the last few races.
Taking off these aero parts was one of the reasons they could not perform better at the Monaco race. In addition, they also struggled with the hypersoft tyres.
“Tyre compounds are going to be the number one priority for us to understand with the new package,” said Grosjean.
“The circuit is very different. It is much more high speed with much more kerb riding, so the set-ups are quite different.”
“We’ve got to get a bit more understanding of them [the hypersofts] before heading to Canada.
“In the race, I’ve got to be honest, the three different compounds just didn’t work for us.
“We were just cruising around, not driving, not pushing as hard as we wanted.”
Ahead of the race, Magnussen anticipated a tough fight for Haas since Monaco circuit favours the mechanical performance over Haas’s Aero advantage. Haas has learnt a few things about the hypersoft in Monaco and it will “try and work” a solution to get better results in Canada, he added.
“The hypersoft tyre is a good tire, though in Monaco I think it was still too hard – it was difficult to switch on,” he said.
“Hopefully, in Canada, it will be a little bit easier. You’ve got longer straights to put load on the tyres at high speed to switch them on.”
