Steiner not blaming Magnussen for spin after “crappy day” for Haas

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Haas team principal Guenther Steiner says Kevin Magnussen isn’t to blame for his spin during testing today.

“The first time in the car to get the tyres to work is difficult,” Steiner explained, “and then that’s exactly what we did.”

“We didn’t get the confidence into Kevin, he went into a gravel trap. That was nothing to do with him, that was our fault.”

“We had a glitch in the settings,” Steiner added, “he couldn’t get the tyres heated up.”

“It’s brutal out there if the tyres are going down on temperature, when you take them out of the blankets, it’s like being on the ice. You see it from the times, they start at 1’28s then work their way down. To get the heat in the tyres, it’s the only thing they are doing, he couldn’t go fast enough in our car and he lost the heat and then just spun out.”

Steiner said the second day was a continuation of the frustrations they experienced in the first. “We had a few issues and then, very similar to yesterday, we just had always our issues at a good time and then we’d get the car ready. It snowed or it rained or it was something.”

Magnussen’s spin left the car with floor damage which caused knock-on problems. “We had to fix the car, it was not a good day,” said Steiner. “This was not what we are about, it was a day to write off to be honest. We learned something but it was not a lot.”

“When we went off this morning we damaged the floor on the bottom, then you need to fix it. It’s a downward spiral. On the side of the barge board, the blinds, one of them on the left-hand side came loose. Normally they are small issues but they take a long time to fix if you don’t have a spare to put on straight away.”

A new floor for the VF-18 is due to arrive tomorrow but as conditions are forecast to deteriorate Steiner intends to continue using the repaired floor.

“We can still fix this one,” he said. “Tomorrow I don’t want the new floor on if we go out, it’s the wrong day to put a new floor on.”

A difficult day for Magnussen was capped by another failure towards the end of the session. “The DRS we lost on the long run,” Steiner explained.

“We called him in because it didn’t open any more. Then he came in and we had to change the complete rear wing because it was getting loose, the bonding. So we lost some time there. then we just went out to do at the end a lap to see if the new one works.”

Romain Grosjean is due to drive the car again tomorrow. Steiner said it is too early to decide whether the team will redistribute the test days between its drivers if tomorrow proves to be a wash-out.

“Today was a write-off,” he said. “You cannot always speculate, you make a decision, the drivers buy into it. Both had a crappy day – Romain yesterday, Kevin today. So I don’t know what the next day’s looking like. If Romain can’t drive then we sort that problem out next week.”

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