Romain Grosjean was full of optimism after qualifying sixth on the grid for the German Grand Prix on Sunday.
The Frenchman has been under pressure after a run of poor results, including speculation he might have been fired by Haas after touching teammate Kevin Magnussen at Silverstone.
But after a strong performance on Friday, Grosjean followed that up by almost claiming the top midfield spot on Saturday with only a great lap from Kimi Raikkonen denying him.
“It’s been a good weekend up until now,” he stated.
“Yesterday we were happy in the very hot conditions with something we wanted to check and to understand. The whole package seems to be working very well.”
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To try and aid Grosjean, he switched back to the package on his Haas as used in Australia and that has seen his pace improve dramatically.
What is also interesting is the significant swings in performance compared to teammate Kevin Magnussen, who has continued with the latest upgraded car.
“Kevin was not so happy with his package yesterday but this morning he was flying in the cooler conditions, so I was like ‘maybe I should have gone for the new car’, and then in qualifying it seems like it was more equal,” he explained.
“In the midfield, it was like four-hundredths separating four cars, which is quite exciting.
“Then Q3, I got the best out of the car, it’s quite impressive that a car that is that old, it’s not old in general but in F1 11 races is a long, long time and it’s still capable of delivering such a strong result so it shows that we know which is the quicker car.
“Now we just need to understand what the difference is between the two packages and why Kevin was so competitive this morning and maybe lost some of that competitiveness. Maybe the fresh track was not so good on my car, and the warmer one it got better.”
The big problem facing Haas has been converting their strong results in qualifying into results on Sunday and Grosjean does worry it may be tough to keep his position.
“That is a possibility. It could also go well,” he said.
“Yesterday the long-run pace was OK, not outstanding, but OK and I think we made the wrong set-up choices yesterday in trying different things.
“From the first lap, I was on target and just building and knowing what’s happening. Is it the case on the race 11 package, the brand new one? It is something that we will have to figure out.”