Romain Grosjean believes being a small team is helping Haas maximise its race strategy after two impressive results.
Despite being a new team, Haas has pulled off two strong strategic races to enable Grosjean to secure sixth place on the team’s debut in Australia and follow that up with fifth in Bahrain on Sunday. Having qualified in ninth place and not attempted to make it through to Q3 in order to save a number of new sets of supersoft tyres for the race, Grosjean says the strategy call was immediately vindicated when the lights went out.
“It was a perfect strategy!” Grosjean said. “No regret at all! On the grid, when I jumped Hulkenberg straight at the start I thought 'this is the new tyres - come on babies, come on!’”
With chief race strategist Ruth Buscombe bringing experience from Ferrari alongside former Lotus chief race engineer Ayao Komatsu, Grosjean believes giving key personnel added responsibility in a smaller team is a major factor in the recent success.
“We’ve got Ruth, Ruth is doing well, we have Ayao … the strength of the team is that we are a small team. So everyone is involved in every decision-making and that is quite interesting because we have more opinions, people are very open-minded, and then we can take the best for us and see what it brings in the race.”
And Grosjean says running three stints on supersoft tyres allowed him to attack throughout the race, with the Frenchman enjoying confidence in the new car.
“It was a good race, a fun race, plenty of new tyres, plenty of overtaking manoeuvres. I have confidence in the brakes, in the car, so I can go for it with overtaking manoeuvres and not have any bad surprises when I get to the apex. I don’t lose downforce whatsoever so its quite nice to be out there.”
RACE REPORT: Rosberg beats Raikkonen to win in Bahrain
AS IT HAPPENED: Bahrain Grand Prix
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