It is Saturday night on the East Coast of the United States. The Spanish Grand prix is tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM. Europe means 8 AM sunday races… yes!
If the F1 season was a football game we’d be starting the second quarter. The team has established a 4 race baseline and are starting to up their expectations. Grosjean and Gutierrez qualified 14thand 16th. Both cars made it out of the first qualifying session and were eliminated in the second. Yes it is racing and second place is the first looser. Getting both cars into Q2 is a reasonable expectation or target for success.
Coming into Spain our hopes were raised just slightly because Catalunya Madrid is the only track on the schedule that the team had performance data on. Grosjean complained that the car was undrivable during practice. They dialed the car back to the Sochi setup and started over. Romain seemed happier with his performance. Or perhaps he was just in a more guarded mindset during the post qualifying media scrum.
The Haas F1 team seems to be consistently qualifying into the area of 12th to 16th positions. Their consistency and reliability have been the hall marks for the team so far. Gains by Mclaren and Renault will keep the mid-pack pressure on the team.
But for the Spanish Grand Prix… again I expect at least 1 car in the points. My target for the team is to have one car in points per race. To maintain that goal we’ll need to see both drivers in points at some point since they have only 1 race so far without a driver in the points.
I expect Grosjean to be in points. He is going to extend the range of his tires and maximize those mediums. He has 2 sets of Hard Compound Pirelli’s. Will we see hard compounds in the race?
prediction: Grosjean in the points.
Not a very exciting journal entry. all of the excitement this race was about Max Verstappen replacing Dany Kvyat at Redbull. I predict a critical mistake by the over zealous Belgian.