Haas: Steiner confirms main focus is on the 2020 F1 season

Haas have had a rough year. From almost beating Renault to 'best of the rest' place 12 months ago, the American team sit ahead of only Williams in F1 2019. Haas were one of the first teams to complete their 2020 driver line-up and team boss Guenther Steiner confirms all focus is on the next season. 

As announced earlier in September, Haas will stick with Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen for at least another season. Steiner believes this is helpful because all of his main focus is on 2020. 

"It's helpful, as now my main focus is on next year's car - to try to make it the best possible from the situation we're in this year. I'm pretty sure we'll get out of it because we have a good understanding," Steiner said ahead of the Russian Grand Prix. 

"Obviously, all this work is brought forward to next year, because next year's car will be an evolution, as there's no regulation change. This year it was a new regulation, so whatever we learn on this car we can implement on next year's car. That was our aim from halfway through the season when we realised we were struggling with our car. We want to make sure not to make the same mistakes on next year's car - that was our main aim from midway through this season."

The development that Haas engineers put on the cars didn't bring any improvements. Grosjean insisted Haas put the old Australian specification on his car midway through the season. At Sochi, the team will have a new aero package, a hybrid of new and old. French driver Grosjean confirms this is all in preparation for the 2020 Formula 1 season. 

"We've brought updates during the year on the car, and those updates haven't really been working as expected. So, we're really trying to understand where the correlation from the wind tunnel to the track is," Grosjean said. 

"That's why we're going to try a different setup, a different aero package on the car, and see if we can actually get a clear understanding and prepare as good as we can for 2020."