Kevin Magnussen: Better for Haas “to focus on next year”

Haas finished fifth in the constructor’s standings behind Renault in 2018 and were set to be contending for the top midfield team again this year.

But Magnussen and Romain Grosjean have only managed to compile 26 points between them, leaving them ninth in the standings ahead of Williams and nine points behind Alfa Romeo.

“I think it’s a pretty ongoing process,” said Magnussen.

“It’s much more important to understand what’s gone wrong with this car than to try to come up with quick fixes.

“It’s not lost this year at all, but it’s better to focus for next year and try to get as ready as we can and have as much confidence in correlations and stuff like that to produce a better product for next year, rather than, in a desperate way, to try to fix this year’s car, because that’s going to be a little bit difficult.

“So the focus is more on different experiments with different packages to try to learn more about correlations and sensitivities and stuff like that.”

Referring to ‘different packages’ the Dane goes on to say that he will be running the newer, updated car while teammate Grosjean will be driving an older version, similar to what the team did before the summer break to better understand what is going on.

“The new one,” Magnussen said when asked about what package he will be running.

“That’s still part of this whole learning process, so I think Romain will stay on the old-ish one, with a few of the new parts.”