The black and orange flag for Kevin Magnussen cost Haas “half a lap” right at the start of the 2022 Hungarian Grand Prix at the Hungaroring, says team boss Günther Steiner. “That was the end of our race.”
And that’s why Haas doesn’t agree at all with the signal from the race control, which forces the driver in question to stop in the pits for repairs.
Steiner says: “Kevin obviously had damage to his front wing. The fact that the FIA called us in was, in our opinion, a mistake. The front wing was obviously still safe.”
Magnussen cracked his wing right after the start on the exit of the first corner when he crashed into Daniel Ricciardo’s McLaren MCL36 from behind. “I couldn’t avoid that,” says Magnussen. “I have no idea what was going on, but he braked when we were on the gas. I couldn’t have predicted that.”
“It wasn’t that bad either, not that hard, so I was surprised to get the black and orange flag. I hope the damage was big, otherwise it was [die Flagge] strange. But what can I do?”
Magnussen comes to the pit stop on lap six
Magnussen had no choice: on lap six he made a forced stop with the end plate protruding to the side and fell back to the end of the field, but from then on he was hopelessly behind. “The only positive thing was that we were with the [verbesserten] car have collected good data. That’s what we were hoping for this weekend,” said Magnussen.
Only he was able to enjoy the modified Haas VF-22 in Hungary, not Mick Schumacher, who continued to drive with the previous specification. But Schumacher did not fare much better than Magnussen in the race: the Haas drivers saw the finish line in 14th and 16th place.
Because both had to struggle over the distance with the Pirelli standard tires. “We couldn’t get the hard tires to work,” explains Magnussen. “Then we went to medium. It went a little better that way, but to be honest: the pace wasn’t there.”
Hard doesn’t work for Mick Schumacher either
Schumacher had a similar experience: After Magnussen stopped for repairs, he was within range of the points, but problems with the hard tires caused him to drop back.
“We had hoped that the hard tires would work, but things turned out differently. So maybe we used the wrong tires in our strategy,” says Schumacher. Magnussen adds: “We crashed on cold tires.”
“These tires,” says Schumacher, “simply didn’t work for us, especially the rear tires. They just didn’t come into the temperature window. I was hoping that the tires would eventually get the corner, but that didn’t happen.”
“For much of the stint it felt like driving on ice. So we ended up going to medium and it all felt better.” Points were then no longer possible, neither for Schumacher nor for Magnussen.
The update seems to work
That’s why team boss Steiner speaks of a “difficult day” for his team. “Unfortunately it was the last race before the summer break but we’re pulling ourselves together and getting back to our old form without any problems of that kind.”
Basically, the Hungarian update on the Magnussen vehicle was convincing. “There’s just a lot of work ahead of us to get the right lap time out of the car,” explains Magnussen. “That will happen over the next few races. There is new potential that we have to unlock.”
Then, according to the Danish racing driver, things would “probably get better” at Haas. You still have to understand the new parts in detail. “We’ll make more of it, we’ll adjust it so that we get a good balance and get more downforce,” says Magnussen.
Schumacher is also pushing for an analysis, “so that we [nach der Sommerpause] know at Spa how the new package works, what we need for the set-up and what we need to be fast.” He continues: “I expect that [neue] Package in Spa looks pretty good. We’ll find out there if that’s the case.”