Esteban Gutiérrez’s first day in Austria did not go to plan, as electronic issues impacted his programme for both of the Friday sessions. Rain in free practice two also limited the amount of dry running done by all of the teams.
Only 40 minutes into the first practice session of the weekend, Gutiérrez was forced to park his car in the garage so that the team could investigate an electrical issues which caused a loss of power. The team rushed to identify and repair the issue, allowing the car to return to the circuit with seven minutes remaining. These issues meant that he would only complete 20 laps in the session, setting the 19th fastest time. His lap time was full second off of the pace of his teammate.
Things weren’t much better in the second session for Gutiérrez. After only seven minutes of running, the circuit was joined by rain. It took roughly 40 minutes before the cars began to run some more laps in the damp conditions. Eventually the cars were able to run the slick tyres, although Gutiérrez wrapped up the day prematurely with another issue similar to the one that he had experienced in the morning. This meant that he ran only 16 laps in FP2.
Team principal of the Haas F1 Team, Guenther Steiner, says that the team will look into Gutiérrez’s issues and hopes that they can make changes to the car in order to prevent this from happening in the future:
“FP1 was productive for Romain. We achieved our program and got a lot of data from the session. We were prepared for the rain in the afternoon, so it wasn’t a normal Friday morning as we did a little of the FP2 program as well. We wanted to do the same with Esteban, but he had an electronic issue which resulted in him only being able to go out to do an installation lap at the end. We were expecting the rain in FP2 and we got as much done as we could. We then waited for the rain to pass but, unfortunately, we had the same electronic problem for Esteban that he experienced in FP1, which resulted in stopping his program early. We are making a few changes and, hopefully, that will resolve the issue. Romain, however, managed a long run and we completed everything we wanted to achieve.”
“It was a very tricky day for us. It was not easy to have consistency, especially with the first practice,” explained Esteban Gutiérrez. “I managed to do some laps, but then we had a problem, which interrupted the whole session. It was the same in the second practice. We had only done a few laps and it started to rain, then at the end of the session I got held up by another issue. So, overall it was not a great day today, but we will try to do our best to recover for tomorrow. I’m looking forward to getting back out there and qualifying.”
On the other side of the garage, Romain Grosjean had a bit more luck with his Friday. After nearly colliding with a spinning Lewis Hamilton in the first practice session, he moved on to complete a total of 34 laps in the first session. In the second session which was impacted by wet track conditions, he ended up lapping slower than his teammate. This is because he was running with a high fuel load while his teammate was not. This explains the under 0.3 second gap between the Haas drivers, although Grosjean was able to complete nearly twice as many laps as his teammate.
The cars return to action tomorrow for the final free practice session and qualifying. The weather conditions could prove to be unpredictable tomorrow as well, as the rain may return to the track.
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