South Tyrolean team boss surprised by his drivers

He admitted to being somewhat surprised by the strong performance of the Haas team before the Australian Grand Prix. “It's not what we expected, but what we hoped for. But you don’t know until you know it,” said the South Tyrolean on Saturday in the Formula 1 paddock. The US team was “best of the rest” in Melbourne qualifying.

The Dane Kevin Magnussen placed his car in sixth place, his teammate Romain Grosjean from France came seventh. Thanks to a penalty for the fifth-placed Red Bull driver Daniel Ricciardo, both of them moved up one place on the starting grid and thus achieved the best qualifying result for the racing team that entered Formula 2016 in 1.

“Don’t know how good we are” “We are confident that our car is good, but we don't know how good it is. We knew that McLaren, Renault and we were about the same level, but not exactly,” said Steiner. His team, which is significantly supported by Ferrari, had already attracted attention with strong partial results in the test drives near Barcelona.

“But during the test drives there are so many variables with the weight, the engine settings, the time of day. We knew we would be close, but we didn’t know whether we would be ahead or behind them,” said the native of Burggräfler, who has been living in North Carolina, in the USA, for several years.

It doesn't matter to him that many observers explain the visible progress solely with the Ferrari engine, which essentially corresponds to the model with which Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Räikkönen drove very quickly last year. “Everyone can have their opinion. But an opinion without insight – I don’t have much to say about it,” explained Steiner. “We don’t do anything that we shouldn’t do or that wouldn’t be allowed. So we’re being completely honest.”

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South Tyrolean team boss surprised by his drivers

The Haas-Equipe Formula 1 cars were among the big winners in qualifying for the first Grand Prix in Melbourne. Günther Steiner, the 52-year-old team boss from Merano, was correspondingly detached.

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