The Haas Formula 1 team is not currently considering giving drivers Romain Grosjean or Kevin Magnussen a NASCAR try-out, instead preferring to focus on its bid to move up the grid in 2017.
NASCAR team co-owner Gene Haas took his eponymous F1 operation onto the grid in 2016, with Grosjean scoring all 29 of its points en route to eighth place in the constructors' championship.
Grosjean and former team-mate Esteban Gutiérrez both expressed an interest in a NASCAR try-out with Haas.
Grosjean had hoped to race at either Watkins Glen or Sonoma last year, but was unable to make it work due to a lack of testing time and a busy F1 schedule.
Magnussen has replaced Gutiérrez at Haas in F1 for 2017, and admitted during a visit to the team's NASCAR facility in Kannapolis earlier this week that he had been "fishing" for a test in one of its stock cars.
However, team principal Günther Steiner was quick to shoot down the suggestion, saying that neither Magnussen nor Grosjean would be distracted by a possible NASCAR try-out while F1 preparations were still in full swing.
"At the moment let’s focus on what we are doing. It’s always that you either do it right or you don’t do it," Steiner said during a group media session attended by NBC Sports.
"These things can’t just be winged at this level. They need to be professional. Everybody gets prepared now for the season and we'll see how we fall into it. Then we’ll maybe consider it again.
"It’s so difficult because of the schedule these guys have got. If we commit to something, we need to do a few tests. Nothing comes for free, we need to manage it as well money-wise. But the main reason why we don’t focus on [it] is still because we want to get better in F1.
"It’s pointless to invest any time in planning something which, maybe once we are in Barcelona, we say ‘you don’t need to do that, you better focus on what we are doing because we are not where we want to be’. Once we are in a happy spot, we'll then reconsider it."
Steiner also suggested that a possible crossover between Haas' operations could see its NASCAR drivers get a single-seater trial, once the team had F1 cars over two years old that were outside of testing restrictions.
"We’ve got a problem, we cannot run an F1 car with one of the NASCAR drivers because we’ve not got old enough F1 cars," Steiner said.
"We need to come up with something a bit wackier or a little bit cooler.
"But at the moment the coolest thing for us to do would be to be showing good in Barcelona and in Australia. That’s the coolest thing that we want to do."
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