Romain Grosjean says Haas’ season has been “the opposite of McLaren’s”, after a spate of setbacks for him and the team.
Haas has regularly had the fourth- or fifth-fastest car in Formula 1 this season but heads into the Spanish Grand Prix eighth in the standings, just a single point clear of Sauber.
Cross-threaded wheel nuts robbed Kevin Magnussen and Grosjean of a potential fourth and fifth in Australia, while the Frenchman lost a bargeboard in Bahrain.
Neither driver profited from the timing of the Safety Car in China, while in Azerbaijan both Magnussen and Grosjean endured strife, the latter crashing out behind the Safety Car, while set for sixth.
McLaren, meanwhile, has failed to progress through to Q3 but has scored points at each Grand Prix, and holds fourth in the standings.
Commenting on his own, and the team’s, setbacks, Grosjean said: “I mean it’s racing. You can’t control everything.
“We’ve seen what happened in Australia, it was unfortunate, what happened in Baku, was unfortunate and then China we got the Safety Car exactly at the wrong time for us.
“In Bahrain we lost parts that we had to pit the car to remove them so if you look at the season itself, if you look at the results, it’s not a great start, you can say worse than that.
“If you look at the facts, it’s not as bad as it looks, it’s actually quite a good season.
“We’re probably the opposite of McLaren who have been lucky all the time in order to be up there and finished the races to get good opportunities and we’ve been pretty much the opposite.”
Grosjean added that Haas is not unduly concerned by its missed opportunities and emphasised that it has 17 races to make amends.
“I mean if you look at 2016, if we hadn’t finished sixth and fifth in the first two races we would have scored P8 in Austria and P10 in the U.S. so [it would have been] five points and we ended with 29,” he said.
“We’ve missed luck and I made a mistake in Baku, the team made a mistake in Melbourne, it happens.
“I think it’s not positive or it’s not useful to look back, it’s like here we should have done that, here we should… what happened, happened and unfortunately yes we are here as a team with 11 points and it’s clearly not where we should be.
“But again we’ve got 17 races to go and we are going to push has hard as we can.”
