Haas explain "creative thinking" after black flag request in FP1

Haas F1 boss Guenther Steiner has admitted he wants his drivers to pay more attention to the pit boards in the future, after Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen were both black-flagged in FP1 for the Monaco Grand Prix.

There was much confusion when an extremely rare black flag was waved during the first free practice session for the Monaco GP. It was later revealed that there was an IT failure back in the garage.

The Haas team could no longer communicate with its drivers via the team radio, and the side didn't have any data from the car's telemetry. The drivers failed to respond to a pit board message, so the team requested help from the FIA.

"We had an issue with the IT equipment," Steiner revealed to Motorsport.com. "We had no data anymore, nothing, no radio, we couldn't contact them and we couldn't see what the car was doing. They needed to come in quick.

"We put the pit board out but they didn't see it, so we came up with the idea: let's ask race control to give them the black flag so they'll come in. That's what we did. Everybody got a little too excited about it.

"We were a little bit creative there, and asked for some help to get them focussed to come in. They got in and then we fixed the problem and we got out in the last 20 minutes."