Haas team principal Guenther Steiner is concerned by the amount of points his team has thrown away this season, warning his drivers that losing points through mistakes is not acceptable.
The American team is currently fifth in the constructors’ standings, but has failed to score points at four rounds this season and is now 19 points shy of Renault in fourth. Pit stop issues saw the team miss out on a big haul of points at the opening round in Australia but since then driver errors — mostly on Romain Grosjean’s side of the garage — have cost Haas dearly.
The most recent example was at Sunday’s British Grand Prix where the two Haas drivers qualified seventh and eighth before colliding at Turn 3 when Grosjean understeered into Magnussen.
Magnussen went on to salvage two points for the team but Grosjean crashed out in an incident with Carlos Sainz shortly after a Safety Car restart.
Asked for his views on the first lap collision between his drivers, Steiner said: “I am not happy. They can happen but it shouldn’t happen. We need to be better than that.
“That’s the conclusion out of this. We need to stop losing points. We are in the points now but we lose them, we do it ourselves. While last year we need to get into the points, now in the moment we need to stop falling out of the points so that’s what we need to get better at.
“The first lap incident, you have no control over anything. It’s down to the drivers and sometimes stuff happens which shouldn’t happen. I am sure Romain didn’t do it on purpose, why would he drive into his teammate?
“But it happens so the drivers need to get better at avoiding these situations as at that point the team can’t do anything. I am not a race car driver.”
Steiner insists he will remain supportive of Grosjean despite the accidents this year but warned that the team must stop losing points through driver errors.
“I will be [supportive] because that is what I need to be because we want to succeed as a team — I don’t know where the tipping point is,” he said. “I am not there yet but at some stage, as I said before, we need to stop losing points — that is the tipping point.
“We can’t keep on doing this. We are through half of the season and we must have lost a lot of points because of our own mistakes and that is not actually acceptable.”