Romain Grosjean is desperate to convert a fifth-place start for Sunday’s Austrian Grand Prix into his first points of the 2018 Formula 1 season.
The Frenchman is one of just two drivers still without a top 10 finish to his name this year, this despite his Haas car often being one of the more competitive packages in the midfield.
Poor luck and crashes have been the reason for that but at the American team’s strongest weekend of the year so far, it was the former Lotus driver who stepped up, splitting the Red Bulls at their home track.
“I’m very happy. I want tomorrow to go well it is nice that I still know how to drive and it was a bad spiral going on and it was hard to stop it,” Grosjean said.
Austria marked the first time this year a midfield team has managed to break the top three teams’ stranglehold on the top six in qualifying with Haas repeating their incredible pace from 12 months ago.
“It is great we have built our weekend nicely, we didn’t think we could catch one of the Red Bull but we did,” Romain claimed. “We are in a good spot to score some points. I’m looking forward to tomorrow and hopefully we stay out of trouble.”
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His teammate Kevin Magnussen was also within a tenth of Daniel Ricciardo in eighth and is confident Haas can remain competitive in the race.
“We’ll see how Sunday goes,” the Dane said. “Our pace yesterday in FP2 on the long runs was pretty good. We’ll take what we can get, but we need to get those points. We’re going to keep our feet on the ground and see what we can get tomorrow.”
