Haas: 'People should think before they make comment on fairness'

Guenther Steiner has called out Haas’ rivals for talking about fairness after they blocked the American team’s request to recover lost track time on Sunday.

Haas sat out the opening morning of the Bahrain pre-season test through no fault of their own.

The team’s freight was late to arrive due to a problem with the plane, Haas only getting out onto the track on Thursday afternoon.

The team made a request to recover the lost hours on Sunday, the day after testing concluded, but three of their rivals – of which McLaren are said to be one – vetoed that.

Instead it was agreed that Haas could tack on extra hours on Friday night and Saturday morning before again finishing late on Saturday night.

That, though, had some questioning the fairness of that given that Haas’ late-night run means they’re on track during the same hours that the Bahrain Grand Prix will be run.

Everyone has returned to their garages but Kevin’s got another 55 minutes to play out ?#HaasF1 #F1Testing pic.twitter.com/MnJibqW6jr

— Haas F1 Team (@HaasF1Team) March 11, 2022

“We never asked to have a night session or anything like this, we just asked for Sunday morning, which would make up for the Thursday morning we lost,” Steiner told Motorsport.com.

“The time I think would have been a much fairer and better solution for everybody. Now some people complain that we can run at night and others cannot, because the race is at night.

“We will get by, as we always do. I don’t want to be here and cry, because I don’t cry. But I think some people should think before they make comments about fairness.”

The returning Kevin Magnussen was the driver who put in the laps during Friday night’s extra hour, the Dane posting the fastest lap time of day two.

He clocked a 1:33.207 to beat Carlos Sainz by over three-tenths.

As for McLaren, team boss Andreas Seidl insists giving Haas extra hours each day was the only “fair solution”.

“We supported that to help Haas, to give them these hours back that they lost,” Seidl said.

“It’s a fair solution. It’s important in those situations that you apply common sense and that you find solutions that can be applied consistently in other cases as well if similar things would happen.

He went onto explain why McLaren were opposed to Haas extending their test through to Sunday.

 

“We have very limited testing, we have only six days,” he said. “If you grant an additional test day, you have another night as well to work on the car and the data and so on and gain an advantage.

“That’s the compromise where we ended up, which has been supported by all the teams. I think that’s more than fair.”

 

 

Source: Read Full Article