Haas need to 'think' hard to recover from prize money reduction

Guenther Steiner says Haas need to put on their “thinking hats” to try and figure out how they will budget the 2020 campaign after likely suffering a significant reduction in prize money from 2018 to this season.

Last season, the team had their best ever campaign, finishing fifth, but that has been followed up by a dismal 2019 campaign as they are currently down in ninth in the constructors’ championship with just five races remaining.

Steiner admits dealing with the deficit will be an issue.

"As always, if you lose out on big money like this, you always have to put your thinking hat on how not to waste money next year,” the Haas team principal told Motorsport.com.

"It's not an existential problem, but for sure it's not like 'yeah, it doesn't matter'. It's something between - we need to manage it, it's never a nice thing to manage less money, as we all know."

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At one point in the season, in order to try and identify the reason for the abject performances, Haas ran two different aerodynamic packages for Kevin Magnussen and Romain Grosjean, and Steiner says this was another expensive experiment which didn’t pay off.

"Absolutely. It's very expensive, and if you don't gain anything, it's wasted,” he added.

"But I think what we learned from it - we know now where are at, and what not to do.

"Now we have to make sure that on next year's car we don't have a similar problem.

"But at least we know the problem, that's the starting point of any improvement - it's knowing what not to do, what caused the lack of performance."

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