Steiner happy to see back of Mexico

Haas F1 Team boss Guenther Steiner will be looking for better fortune in the final two races of the season.
Haas F1 Team boss Guenther SteinerHaas F1 Team boss Guenther Steiner
Haas F1 Team boss Guenther Steiner

Esteban Gutiérrez and Romain Grosjean finished 19th and 20th, respectively, in Sunday’s Mexican Grand Prix at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez. The result capped a frustrating race weekend for the Banbury team, as struggles in practice on Friday led to a disappointing qualifying performance on Saturday with neither driver getting out of Q1.

Steiner said: “It was a tough day and a tough weekend for us. We started on the wrong foot and it ended how it ended.

“Sometimes you have to go through bad experiences like this to be able to learn from them. I hope this is our only bad weekend of the year.

“We’ve got two more races to go. We’ll get ourselves ready for those and get our spirits up again.”

Grosjean said: “We tried to change a few parts to analyse what was going wrong but we really haven’t found the problem yet. The car was just nowhere, it was very difficult to handle and to drive, we didn’t get anything right.

“We’re experiencing inconsistency with lots of oversteer and understeer. I never knew what I was going to get out there, the car was pulling on the left under braking.”

Gutiérrez added: “It was an incredible experience. We were pushing all the way, pushing all the limits we could with the car we had.

“I had to take care of the brakes as we were struggling with the cooling of them, so I had to brake a lot earlier than I would have liked to.

“That wasn’t ideal when trying to fight your way up the grid, but it’s the only thing we could do to finish the race.

“I wish we could have been able to deliver something better this weekend but, unfortunately, we were not able to this time.”

Haas remains eighth in the constructor standings with 29 points.

The Banbury team kept the gap to seventh-place Toro Rosso at 26 points and maintained its 21-point advantage over ninth-place Renault, as neither Toro Rosso nor the Enstone team finished in the points.

Lewis Hamilton raced to his 51st career Formula One victory, equaling the tally of legend Alain Prost.

It was also Hamilton’s eighth win of the season as he beat his Mercedes team-mate and championship leader Nico Rosberg. The victory cut Rosberg’s advantage over his Brackley team-mate from 26 points to 19 points.

Formula One returns for the season’s penultimate race, the Brazilian Grand Prix later this month at São Paulo.

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