26 December 2023 , 13:01
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Haas are on the "wrong path" after a season that saw them finish bottom of the constructors' championship.
The American outfit scored just 12 points in the recent campaign after finishing in the top ten just four times. Nico Hulkenberg and Kevin Magnussen, who were axed as the team's line-up before returning in recent years, struggled to find any performance from the package provided.
Haas have largely sat near the bottom of the standings for several years with an attempted driver shake-up failing to improve results. The team saw a late season upgrade in fact make them slower and Timo Glock has questioned where the outfit is heading.
The former F1 driver told Sky Germany : “The worst case scenario at Haas is that the new car with the upgrade is slower than the old car that Nico Hulkenberg had in this race. That shows that the entire team is on that is the wrong path.
“That gives little hope for next year and makes it difficult to understand why we saw such good data in the wind tunnel. As a team, you are flying blind. The question is what is Guenther Steiner’s idea to get out again. It will be a mammoth task in the first six months.”
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Hulkenberg finished seventh in the third race of the season in Australia, but otherwise three more tenth place finishes were all the team could muster. Sporadic impressive performances in qualifying were not matched by promising race pace with the team often going backwards.
Haas struggled for pace for much of the seasonTheir German driver confessed that he had few opportunities to score points with the latter part of the season proving to be particularly challenging. Hulkenberg said: “The last or the second half of the season has been been been really tough. I think there was only an opportunity to score a point or two for me in Singapore, which we missed by by the wrong strategy call.
"Apart from that we just never had the pace to do it. Even when there was a lot of cars dropping out we were just too far away from it. So of course that’s not great and that’s why we need to do better.”
Despite the understandable pessimism surrounding Haas their team principal has lofty sights for the future. Back in May Steiner claimed the ambition is "getting better every year – it’s as simple as this – and at some stage we want to be winning races. I don’t know how far away it is and I’m not going to say it’s this season or next season, but at some stage, it will happen with Haas.”