Haas encouraged by Portugal’s performance

Haas is getting closer to midfield while his two drivers make progress and gain experience, which team boss Günther Steiner encourages.

Mick Schumacher was 0.6 seconds behind a place in Q2 in Portugal, but then delivered an impressive race without mistakes and overtook Nicholas Latifi late after forcing the Williams driver to make a mistake. Schumacher’s best lap was also a match for George Russell before him, and Steiner sees the gap with the likes of Williams shrinking as his drivers feel more comfortable in the car.

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“I think it’s a combination of many things,” said Steiner. “The drivers feel more comfortable in the car, they know the ups and downs, they adapt, they know what not to do, find the balance better and if the car is a little unstable, they can easily deal with it.

“We did it at racing speed or we were better than the Williams. We all know George can do a fantastic lap in the car – like Charles Leclerc sometimes, he can just do it – so it was a very encouraging race for us. We see that we can be faster than a Williams, we just can’t get past them.

“We’re about 10 km / h short on the straight, so it was difficult to overtake them, but otherwise we can keep up with them or be a little faster. As I have always said, we have to be patient with both drivers for everything. We still have to be patient because if it were easy to get into Formula 1 and get as fast as the other people who were there for a couple of years, I don’t think it would be called Formula 1. “

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– Haas F1-Team (@ HaasF1Team) May 3, 2021

While Schumacher impressed, Nikita Mazepin was far from his teammate after an additional pit stop. But Steiner saw signs of improvement in the Russian as well, saying the pair are only developing at different speeds.

“Everything was good, when (Schumacher) put Latifi under pressure, he didn’t do anything wrong and then stepped back when it was not possible to overtake in order to save the tires,” he said. “He drove a very good race.

“Over the weekend, if you look at FP3, the gap got closer and closer and the race in the first 20 laps on C2 tires fell (Mazepin) 4 seconds back in my opinion and then we pulled it up because he would have gone. ”in the cycle of getting out of the box with the traffic lapped. We tried to keep it as clean as possible. That’s why you saw a big gap between them and we made an additional pit stop.

“At the moment Mick has a bit of the upper hand, but I wouldn’t say he’s that fast or that Nikita is that bad. We’ve only done three races so I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. We have to wait a little longer; maybe Nikita needs a little longer to get up to date. “