A difficult debut season for Haas F1 would have been even harder to swallow if it wasn’t for star driver Romain Grosjean, according to boss Gene Haas.
The Frenchman was vocal about his frustration with the team’s problems towards the end of the season but scored all 29 points in their first season on the grid.
Those points put Haas eighth in the Constructors’ championship and Grosjean 13th in the Drivers’ standings.
“I tell you, if it wasn’t for those 29 points, we would have been in a world of hurt,” Haas told ESPN. “So that in itself, just scoring those points, was worth every penny with [Grosjean] coming on board.”
After a strong start to the season, top 10 finishes became few and far between, as front wing and brake issues plagued the new team.
“I’m disappointed we couldn’t keep the same rate as we could have got 100 points [by the end of the season], but I’m very happy with what we got,” he added.
Grosjean’s dream of becoming world champion with Haas is still a long way off, but the team is in Formula One for the long run and expect improvements next season.
What would help Grosjean, and the team, would be a more competitive driver to race against. The Frenchman’s 2016 teammate, Esteban Gutierrez, failed to score a single point, though he did come close on a number of occasions.
Grosjean can expect a little more competition from his 2017 partner, however, and Gene Haas expects Kevin Magnussen to “bring a racer’s perspective” and push Grosjean more.
“I think he’s good at getting points when you need to, which is extremely difficult to do,” Haas claimed. “You can be extremely fast in qualifying and individual laps, but racing on race day is another discipline. There are some people who are really great at it.
“We were talking to Kevin even before Grosjean, we knew that he had a lot of potential. I’ve watched him drive around a lot of circuits and watched him in traffic and I think he has the ability to grab points when we need to, and that’s what we need.”
Magnussen took points on only two occasions last season but showed his potential in his debut season with McLaren.
Drivers are only part of Haas’ problem, though. If the team wants to consistently finish in the points, they will need to fix the mechanical issues they saw in the latter half of 2016, most notably those failing brakes.
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