Haas weren't surprised by their difficult qualifying session after enduring a troubling practice one and two on Friday for the United States Grand Prix.
Esteban Gutierrez will start 14th after making it through to Q2, whilst team-mate Romain Grosjean struggled in traffic and failed to make the cut, qualifying down in 17th – in stark contrast to last time out in Japan when both made it through to Q3.
Team principal Guenther Steiner believes the issues they experienced on Friday hurt their qualifying preparation and therefore says a poor result wasn't "unexpected".
"Not an unexpected qualifying result. We struggled yesterday. We had a lot of downtime with small issues on the cars, so we didn’t do a lot of running," he said. "In FP3 we got a little better understanding and then finished 14th and 17th in qualifying.
"It was a very good job from Esteban to get into Q2. Romain almost made it, but he got a bit hung up in traffic in the last sector of his lap, so he ended up 17th, just one place out of Q2. We will try to do our best tomorrow."
Steiner says the team are still learning in their first season and such tiny errors can be costly because the margins are so tiny.
"We’ve learned a lot over the weekend. We keep on learning every time. Last week we had both cars in Q3. This week we got stuck with one car in Q1.
"It’s so close in the midfield, and that’s the main reason why these things happen.
"Our car doesn’t seem to be very good in the slow-speed areas and you can see that on sector three of this circuit. But we’ll be up and going for tomorrow and aim to have a good race."
