Magnussen: 2018 shows Haas potential

Haas driver Kevin Magnussen believes that Haas' performances in 2018 show that there is potential within the team to build upon. Although the team is likely to miss out on fourth in the constructors' championship, the Dane sees their opportunities this season as positive steps they need to continue.

With just one more race remaining in 2018, the team would need to score 24 more points with Renault failing to score a single point in order to overtake their French rivals.

“I think 55 points is good for a midfield team, but I still think there was potential for more this year. That’s both a positive and a negative. Positive, because we’ve showed we have great potential in the team to do more, but of course, it’s always disappointing not to get everything out of it as you could.

“We’re learning as a team and next year we’ll have even more experience. We’ll have learned a lot from this year and, hopefully, we can do a bit more next year.

“As a team, we’re doing better and better. We’re learning as we go. For us, we’re such a new team, performing at such a high level already, sometimes we’re a bit short of experience for the performance levels being achieved.

“We’re fighting big, experienced teams like Renault, McLaren, Williams and, as a new team, sometimes it’s hard to avoid mistakes because of a lack of experience.

“I’d rather be in an inexperienced team overperforming than in an experienced team underperforming.”

Magnussen added that they could have done even better this season but admitted that the team had squandered some opportunities.

“A lot of things that could go wrong, did go wrong. We haven’t had the margins on our side this year. A lot of things just tipped over to the wrong side to our disadvantage. Sometimes you have seasons like that.

“Generally, though, we’ve been strong all year. We’ve just had some missed opportunities.”