Following the high of Haas’ best result in Formula 1 a week earlier in Austria, frustration with Romain Grosjean and his number of incidents appears to be growing at the American team.
At the British Grand Prix, the Frenchman would be involved in three collisions, a high-speed shunt into the barrier at Abbey in practice blamed on the DRS, and then two further moments in the race, including contact with teammate Kevin Magnussen at Turn 3 before a race-ending crash with Carlos Sainz.
The first race incident would drop both Haas cars out of the points, having started seventh and eighth, and despite being the one to hit his teammate, Grosjean believes both were at fault.
“At the beginning of the race with Kevin, I think it was a mistake from both of us,” he said. “It shouldn’t happen, so we need to work on that to ensure it doesn’t happy anymore.
“That obviously cost us a lot of positions on the first corner.”
Later with Sainz, the former Lotus driver tried a bold move into the near flat-out Copse corner with contact and a trip to the barriers the outcome, again though…
“With Carlos, I haven’t studied the footage, to be fair, [but] it felt like he turned in quite hard on the corner and didn’t give me much room on the inside,” Grosjean claimed.
“I tried to go on the brake to avoid a contact, but there was not much room for me to go. It’s a shame.”
The stewards deemed it a racing incident and despite what Romain has perceived as a year of bad luck, with the fourth in Austria his only points of 2018, his boss Guenther Steiner is losing patience.
“I wouldn’t call this bad luck. It’s getting frustrating,” he told RaceFans.
“We all hope for him that we are going up and now we are down in the dumps again and we need to get out again.
“We will get out of it, it’s always hard work, but we should put pour hard work into scoring points instead of getting up again.”
Asked if there would be a point where enough is enough, the Italian added: “I don’t know where the tipping point is, I’m not there yet. But at some stage, as I said before, we need to stop losing points, that is the tipping point.
“We cannot keep on doing this. We are now through half the season and we must have lost a lot of points because of our own mistakes and this is actually not acceptable.”
