Romain Grosjean says reliability is one area Haas has to focus on across the rest of 2019, in the wake of another retirement, this time at the Hungarian Grand Prix.
Haas has struggled for race performance through this season with its perplexing VF-19, which has prompted its drivers to run different car specifications across the past three events.
Grosjean has been driving a Melbourne-spec car while team-mate Kevin Magnussen has run with the latest updates.
But reliability has also been one factor to hinder the team’s progress, with Grosjean failing to reach the chequered flag on six occasions this year, completing the fewest laps of any driver.
“It’s a hard season, it’s been good in terms of understanding the car and what we need to do,” said Grosjean post-race in Hungary.
“Obviously we ned to do better work in getting the car to the chequered flag as I think 50 per cent of the races we retired. We need to improve that.
“But I think in terms of understanding the car it’s been good, rough, because the performance has not been there, but good.”
Grosjean had already slipped out of contention for the points in Hungary by the time a suspected water pressure issue struck his VF-19.
“In the first stint I was keeping everyone behind and looking after my tyres,” said Grosjean.
“We made an early stop for the Hard. That was not a good tyre to be on. We saw with Max [Verstappen] at the end there was no grip.
“Soft/Medium was the right strategy but because we didn’t try much on Friday we didn’t have much idea. We fitted the Hard, but with blue flags and so on we could tell there was no grip and it was going to be long.”
