Haas F1 Team Defiant After ‘Losing 15 Points’ in Recent Races

• Haas F1 Team is on a run of five successive Formula 1 Grands Prix without a point, during which there have been strategic errors, clumsy crashes, and reliability setbacks.

• The recent lackluster return has left Haas ninth in the F1 standings.

• Haas has slipped behind Aston Martin, and now only is in front of the struggling Williams outfit.

The Haas F1 season started superbly with that fairy-tale fifth place for comeback king Kevin Magnussen in Bahrain.

Since then, matters have turned a little sour.

Heading into Sunday's F1 British Grand Prix, the team is on a run of five successive Grands Prix without a point, during which there have been strategic errors, clumsy crashes, and reliability setbacks. The nadir came at the most recent event in Canada, where fifth- and sixth-place qualifying efforts for drivers Magnussen and Mick Schumacher was squandered before the race even reached mid-distance.

Magnussen collected race-ruining first-lap damage after brushing Lewis Hamilton—the second time in four Grands Prix the pair had hit—while Schumacher’s prospects ended when the Ferrari power unit packed up.

The recent lackluster return has left Haas ninth in the standings, having slipped behind Aston Martin, and now only in front of the struggling Williams outfit.

“It’s not like we haven’t scored points and can say it is the same thing that happens every time, it has been different things: bad luck, reliability, some mistakes, it was just a bad period of time where things haven’t gone right,” said Magnussen ahead of this weekend’s British Grand Prix at Silverstone. “It feels like it’s going to come, it’s going to turn around and go our way at some point, so I’m not down about it because we have a car that is competitive every time.

“It’s always exciting going into the weekend, the mood is high, and we know there is a chance to score points every race. It is just about hanging on and being patient.”

Team boss Guenther Steiner added that “we should have 10 or 15 points more and we don’t” but “should and would doesn’t take us anywhere. The only thing you can do is keep up the spirit, and everyone is upbeat.”

“We had two tough years (in 2020 and 2021), and we just need to go back to where we were before and we’ll be fine. We finished fifth in the championship (in 2018) and a lot of the same people are here.

“I don’t call it only bad luck what happened to us on the race days but it will turn, we will get in the groove and it will be fine. We had five races where out of the five at least four we should have scored points. They are not there, that’s what we missed.

“Obviously I’m not trying to hide and find five minutes of excuses for what we did. Yeah, we need to do better on Sundays.”

Mechanical failures skewered Magnussen in Monaco and Azerbaijan, but in both races the Dane squandered his prospects with first-lap clashes with Hamilton, while running inside the top six.

But neither Magnussen nor Steiner feel a change of approach is needed.

“It’s not quite normal to have these slight contacts, but it seems this year with slight contact there is big consequence. When we hit in Barcelona we both got punctures, and in Canada I lost a bit of the front wing, but it kept stuck and I had to pit, so there was a big penalty for it,” Magnussen said. “I don’t think I need to change that much, but you never want to have contact ever, so I’ll try and avoid it.

Steiner backed his driver.

“To be honest both times he paid the consequences and normally that doesn’t happen,” Steiner said. “If you tell them what to do, to go slow, you know what happens—someone runs into you. It’s one of those things I say guys do the best you can, stay out of trouble, but can you guarantee it? No way.

"You are not in control of the other 19 cars.”