Hulkenberg urges Haas to ‘regroup and refresh’ over summer break
Nico Hulkenberg was left ruing a difficult weekend at Spa-Francorchamps as Haas endured a torrid time in the Belgian Grand Prix.
The German driver struggled to find a rhythm the circuit's high-speed sweeps and admitted to a frustrating lack of harmony with his car, leaving him unable to extract its full potential.
Unfortunately, there were no positives to take away on the other side of the Haas garage, with Kevin Magnussen enduring an equally challenging race.
“Very difficult,” Hulkenberg said of Sunday at Spa which he concluded a lowly 18th at the tail end of the field. “Just no pace, no harmony, no rhythm.
“I don’t know, I just didn’t get off on the right foot with the car this weekend and we didn’t manage to find a sweet spot with all the different sessions.
“We need to look into a little bit why, but to some extent I think just forget this weekend, regroup, refresh over the summer break and go again.”
“Yeah, I think especially on my side. Kevin looked a bit better and obviously he pulled off a one-stop which was not bad and decent. But still overall we need to look into our low-downforce performance.”
Magnussen, who finished the day P14, described Haas' race as “the worst we’ve had in a while”.
Starting from P17, the Dane opted for a one-stop strategy in a bid to climb the order. While he briefly managed to break into the points-scoring positions, the Dane ultimately slipped back to finish 15th, a result later upgraded to 14th following George Russell's disqualification.
Reflecting on the race, Magnussen attributed the team's struggles to a lack of outright pace rather than any strategic errors.
“I think we had a decent race,” the 31-year-old said. “We just didn’t have the pace to fight further up today, so [we] just took what we could and did a one-stop which was fine.
“Can’t really say we did anything wrong, we just weren’t fast enough.”
©Haas
Asked if his race had been made more difficult by a set-up compromise decided before Saturday’s wet qualifying, Magnussen said: “I don’t think it was that, we just kind of did the best we could for the car in broad terms. We didn’t focus specifically on the race.
“Actually what we thought would be best for quali was probably also going to be best for the race, so we didn’t really have any compromise – we were just not fast enough.”
Like his teammate, Magnussen felt that Haas was in need of a reset during F1’s upcoming summer break.
“This track, we thought it was going to be good for us, but we’ve been surprised many times and this is the worst race we’ve had in a while so, yeah, looking forward to the summer break.
“I think everyone is, and then coming back to more races where we’ll score some more points.”
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