Haas "blindsided" by strong 2018 results

Haas really struggled during the 2019 season. The problem seemed to be with the tyres and despite being competitive in qualifying, they were way off the race pace for much of the season and were unable to improve on their strong 2018 performance. 

The American team performed well in 2018, finishing the season 5th and they were disappointed not to have built on this in 2019, instead, finishing the season ninth. Team boss Guenther Steiner says that the Bahrain Grand Prix, the second race on the calendar, was the first sign things were wrong. 

"That's the first time it came to light that something isn't right, and we found we could not manage the tyres," Steiner said to Autosport. 

"Then we tried to work with the tyre, tried to influence the tyre from the outside, instead of going down to see if we had an aero problem because the car was good in qualifying.

"Barcelona, again we weren't sure if it worked or not, but when you get a good result you believe in it."

Steiner thinks that having relative success in 2018 could have been a negative and the team expected to do better than they did. 

"Maybe by having these good results, in the beginning, we were a little bit blindsided, because having come off a season like 2018, which was very good, maybe we were a little bit overconfident - we just know it now.

"Not knowing where you are, you don't react properly, and once you really understand what it is [causing the problems] - which was summer break time - it's too late.

"After the summer break you don't think of the race track anymore, we were just too far off. So it was better to go back and focus on 2020."

Haas will hope to have fixed their issues ahead of the 2020 season and climb back up near the top of the midfield battle.