Haas’ last time scoring in an F1 sprint race was at the Miami Grand Prix, when Nico Hulkenberg improved from 10th in the F1 sprint race qualifying to 7th in the F1 sprint race, earning the team two valuable points.
F1 returns to the F1 sprint format at this weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix, but will Haas be able to score some points?
It’s been a tough time for the team since Miami, with their best chance of scoring points coming at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix at Imola, where Hulkenberg qualified 10th but finished 11th, one place short of the points. Since then, they’ve been reduced to watching from the outside, including a double DNF at Monaco after an opening lap collision involving Sergio Pérez.
The recent struggles have given Alpine an opportunity, as their strong performances in recent weeks (six points from two race weekends) have seen them overtake Haas in the constructors’ championship standings. Alpine now sits in seventh place with eight points, one point (and ranking) ahead of Haas on seven.
Haas heads to the Red Bull Ring along with the other teams for this weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix and will be hoping their recent success at the circuit can help them score some points.
“It’s a short track but a lot of fun,” Hulkenberg said at his team’s media preview. “The track is long so you’re fighting in a bunch in qualifying which makes it difficult, but it’s a sprint so you have two chances. I know I can do it because I scored points at the Red Bull Ring last year and I want to score points again so that’s my mission at Spielberg.”
Meanwhile, at the other end of the garage, Kevin Magnussen, who hopes his F1 future will be decided “soon”, is wary that Austria’s many high-speed corners could pose problems for the team’s VF-24.
“It’s a fun track. I have good memories of the Red Bull Ring and it’s where we’ve had some of our best results as a team so I’m looking forward to going back,” said Magnussen. “We have a pretty efficient car so we have good straight-line speed so hopefully we can do well there too. There are still quite a few high-speed corners which may not be our forte but we seem to be pretty consistent and doing good on most of the tracks so I’m looking forward to a fun sprint weekend.”
Haas race engineer Mark Slade walked around the various corners the Red Bull Ring has to offer and spoke about whether each one suits the team’s challenger.
“The big thing about the Red Bull Ring is that it’s going to be very busy, especially in practice and qualifying, because the laps are so short. It’s got a good mix of slow, medium and high speed corners and of course it’s a fantastic environment so it looks great and it’s going to be quite a challenge with the car set-up,” Slade explained. “We’ve had some issues in the mid-speed corners so we expect we’ll have to get a handle on that. It’s a challenge for us, but on the other hand we’re generally very good in the slow corners and I think we’ve made a step forward recently in the high-speed corners too. We’ll see how it goes, but of course we have a plan.”
While many teams are grappling with the challenges posed by F1’s shortened sprint weeks, Slade explained that for a team like Haas, the compressed schedule offers additional benefits.
“There’s a lot of extra work involved in the sprints, especially in between triple-headers, but that’s also what makes it so interesting – it’s all part of F1,” Slade said. “We have to be realistic that we can’t do everything we want to do in one practice session, so we have to choose the most important points that we think are relevant to getting the best performance out of the car in both the sprints and the race and work to achieve those targets. It’s a very condensed, highly edited run plan.”
“The sprint format is different to previous years and points are only awarded up to eighth place, so we have the leeway to be a bit more experimental in the sprint race. Realistically, we’re aiming for the last position to score points so we can try things that we wouldn’t necessarily have tried because we know we can change it for the race.”
Slade and the rest of the team will make their debut at the Red Bull Ring this Friday.
