In 2022 Haas F1 Team was the real big surprise of the first part of the season. The VF-22 allowed the pilots of the American team – especially Kevin Magnussen – to show excellent performances both in qualifying and in the race.
The VF-22 was a single-seater with very simple shapes, but also immediate in being able to be exploited. A wide window of use that allowed for many points to be scored when other teams were still struggling to understand the characteristics of their vehicle.
The VF-23, on the other hand, seems like a whole other story. Not so much in the results: both out of the points, i.e. a diametrically opposite start to last season’s. As for the complexity of the tuning, the balance, which made life difficult for Kevin Magnussen.
The Danish driver said he was looking forward to the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. Jeddah could be a much more favorable track for the American single-seater (but also, if not above all, for those in possession of the Ferrari 066/7 engine), a place to better understand its strengths and try to set it up for the first part in season, waiting for the first updates.
“The next circuit will be very different to this one both in terms of speed and track surface, so we’ll see how it goes,” said Magnussen. “But I think we’re quite confident about the potential of the car, which has good speed. We just need to manage the tires and optimize the set-up, because the car isn’t as simple as others we’ve had. But it seems to me that it has good potential. “.
Zhou Guanyu, Alfa Romeo Racing C43, Nico Hulkenberg, Haas VF-23
Photo by: Alfa Romeo
“I don’t know yet what the main problem with this single-seater is. Obviously I can’t draw a conclusion. I think we need to find the car’s strong point and on my side of the garage we didn’t find it this weekend, but I’m very confident that we will find him in the near future. Nico (Hulkenberg, ed) has shown that the car has excellent potential”.
Excellent potential shown, of course, but only in flashes. The qualifications set up by Nico Hulkenberg were amazing, a symptom of how much the VF-23 is already ready on the flying lap, at least in the hands of the German.
But the race turned out to be a completely different story. Hulkenberg damaged his wing due to contact with another car from the first corner and thus lost not only front downforce, but also race pace, sinking him into the bottom of the standings.
“It’s difficult to talk about the potential of the car, because I ran with the damaged car for half the race,” said Hulkenberg. “With the wing problem I was missing downforce and couldn’t take advantage of the real VF-23.”
“When I made a pit stop and they changed the damaged nose, then the car returned to normal. The second part of the race was certainly more representative and we went well, but now I had no hope of getting a good result after what happened at the start and in the first part”, concluded the German.
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