Haas need more testing to make new brakes last

Haas says it needs to conduct more testing with the Carbone Industrie brakes it has trialled recently in order to get them to last a race distance.

The has been investigating whether to switch from regular supplier Brembo in a bid to improve its performance. It ran Carbone Industrie brakes in the post-Bahrain Grand Prix test and on Friday at Sochi but reverted to Brembo hardware for the race.

Team principal Guenther Steiner explained why it doesn’t plan to race the Carbone Industrie brakes at next weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix.

“We weren’t getting enough cooling for them, [in Russia] and if you don’t cool them enough, you overheat the brake itself and the pedal gets long. Also, the wear is very high.”

“We looked into it to see if we could survive a race, but we realised we could not. Therefore, the decision was taken to go back onto the Brembo. As it stands now, we will race Brembo in Barcelona.”

“To figure out how we can fix the problem will take a bit, but we will get there. It isn’t an easy problem to solve. We will take our time. We know what we’ve got after our Bahrain test with CI brakes, and after Sochi in FP1 and FP2. We know what we need to do and what needs to get done, but it will take a little bit of time.”

Romain Grosjean had been dissatisfied with the performance of a previous generation of Brembo brakes but has described their latest offering as an improvement.

“Romain was pretty happy with the latest iteration of Brembo,” said Steiner. “He said he’s OK with it.”

“Kevin [Magnussen] liked the CI better because the bite is better. He just has a better feeling with the CI brakes. Now we need to get the CI working and see where we stand before coming to the absolute conclusion. I’ll be happy when we can check this off of our list.”

“Everybody needs to understand that this is a very sophisticated brake system. It is not easy to fix. The obvious question, and rightly people ask, is that it cannot be this difficult to fix a brake. It actually is. It isn’t easy.”

“This is because they’re highly complicated technologies, they’re highly advanced. When you change from one to the other, you encounter issues you’re not aware of until you try it properly. Without testing during the season, you need to do it in FP1 and FP2. You always have to wait two weeks to do something.”

“So you can never go and do a proper test and do modifications. You always have to fit it in somehow. It compromises your testing, and that’s why it takes so long. It’s not that we’re not working hard. Our people are very competent and can do this, it just takes time.”

2017 Spanish Grand Prix