Haas and Aston Martin have confirmed both teams will start both cars from the pit lane for today’s United States Grand Prix in order to change setups.
Both teams have brought upgrade packages to Circuit of The Americas but Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll were eliminated in Q1 on Friday. While Haas fared better, with Kevin Magnussen qualifying 14th and Nico Hulkenberg 16th, both drivers struggled in race trim and slipped backwards in the sprint on Saturday.
Now with a picture of how the heavily updated Haas is behaving, the team has decided to make significant setup changes to both cars to learn more about the developments across a full race distance, rather than repeat Saturday’s issues.
The same decision has been taken by Aston Martin, but the team will split approaches with Alonso reverting to the Qatar specification of car and Stroll staying with the new spec but making setup changes to ensure both are similarly configured for comparison.
Deputy technical director Eric Blandin says some initial simulation errors were to blame for the team struggling from the start of the weekend.
“In FP1 we because of a mistake on the sim,” Blandin said. “We put too much blanking on the front brakes so they effectively c aught fire, that’s why we couldn’t run more than two laps with Lance in the morning and that really put us in the back foot for the whole weekend.
“In FP1 we couldn’t really optimize the setup of the car with the new package. As a consequence, I think the car is far from its optimum setup with the new package.
“So we will start both cars from the pit lane, and we are effectively changing the setup. We think there is a lot more performance to come from the car, but we took the pragmatic approach to start both cars with, one with the Qatar spec, and one with the new package.”
The result is Daniel Ricciardo will be promoted to 14th on the grid ahead of Williams pair Alex Albon and Logan Sargeant in 15th and 16th respectively.
