The Haas F1 Team heads this week to its all-important home race, and the US outfit's double-points finish in Japan has pointed the team's homecoming in the right direction.
Although a series of mishaps complicated its recent run, Haas came away from Formula 1's Asian swing with seven points, proving the young squad can handle adversity and still deliver the goods come race day.
Suzuka was obviously a high point for Haas, with Kevin Magnussen and Romain Grosjean both achieving a top-ten finish. A result which nicely sets up the team's prospects for next weekend.
"It’s always motivating," says team boss Guenther Steiner.
"What these guys work for is success. For us, success is to be scoring points. We scored with two cars for the second time since we entered Formula One, which is less than two years.
"Everybody is pumped up and now we come to the United States, the home country of Haas F1 Team. For sure it’s motivating and everybody wants to keep it going."
Steiner insists however that there is no specific game plan to keep the ball rolling in Austin, where Haas expects another fierce mid-field battle.
"There is no recipe to that one. We just go out in FP1, see where we are, and go from there. As I always say, to make predictions this year, in the midfield, is impossible.
"Nobody can predict it. People wrote us off after Malaysia. They said we’d scored the last of our points this year. Then we came back in Japan with two cars in the points.
"Anything can happen. It doesn’t depend only on how we are doing, but how good the other teams are.
"That’s obvious, but by being so tight, anything can happen. Last year we scored a point at COTA and we’ll try to do better this year."
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