Formula 1 News: Tire degradation haunted Haas team all year

The floundering Haas team’s inability to get a handle on severe tire degradation during F1 races in 2023 prevented them from rolling out meaningful car upgrades.

–by Mark Cipolloni–

Although the team is American registered, it is American in name only. The team is 100% based in Europe and in fact, its design team sits on Ferrari’s campus in Maranello.  The team buys its engine, transmission and suspension from Ferrari.

Haas technical director SImone Resta, who is on loan from Ferrari, told Speedcafe the team was planning a string of development parts through the season.

However, its inability to design tire degradation out of the car prevented the engineers from rolling out effective chassis and aero upgrades. The car was fast for a lap or two and then performance would degrade.

“I was surprised,” team boss Guenther Steiner confessed.

“The problem was, we didn’t find any performance in the development.

“It wasn’t that we didn’t want to or we couldn’t bring upgrades. We didn’t bring upgrades because bringing an upgrade and knowing that the car would not be any faster, there’s no point.

“I mean, obviously, that was a surprise that we didn’t make any progress in development in the wind tunnel.”

“We used it [wind tunnel capacity] to bring this upgrade for Austin, which are a complete revamp of the car, of the bodywork,” Steiner said.

“We used the money there because that was a big one.

“Next year it’s a complete new car anyway, and we start from zero,” Steiner added of his drivers’ differing opinions on the B-spec VF-23.

“They both are very outspoken – I like this one, I like this one. I don’t argue anymore about next year, you start from zero and you need to develop the car, [so] that the car is faster and the drivers like it better.”