Haas still searching in Russia
The Haas cars have had a similarly complicated start to the weekend in China, at least in terms of pace: both Romain Grosjean's and Esteban Guttierez's American single-seaters have barely managed to climb above 16th place.
Romain Grosjean, like his teammate, is experiencing difficulties especially with the Pirelli tires, even though the use of super softs had been his strength in Bahrain: “We didn’t have a very easy day trying to evaluate how to make our tires and the car work,” admitted the French driver. “We can improve and make the car better. Fortunately, we can find these answers for tomorrow since our performance is not exactly where we would like it to be.”
Esteban Guttiérez, very close on a lap to Romain Grosjean, is at least pleased with the number of laps completed by Haas this Friday (88 in total): « I am quite satisfied with the overall progress of the day, since we were able to complete a large number of laps ». But he remains realistic about the challenges ahead before Saturday afternoon: « We are not as competitive as I would have hoped, but we have gathered a lot of data today. (…) We are still working on our super soft tire settings, so I think FP3 will be very important for us to have a good reference for qualifying. »
The Mexican also experienced new reliability issues this morning, with the battery. He had to wait 50 minutes in the garage before he could get back on the track normally.
