Haas drivers ‘clear the air’ following Spanish GP contact

Haas Formula 1 boss Guenther Steiner held “clear the air” talks with drivers Kevin Magnussen and Romain Grosjean after the pair made contact during the Spanish Grand Prix.

The Haas teammates clashed at Turn 1 as they squabbled for position at the restart following a late Safety Car, with Grosjean being bumped wide as Magnussen forced his way past with a bold lunge.

Following a failed attempt to overtake Magnussen on Lap 52, Grosjean was soon passed by McLaren’s Carlos Sainz and Toro Rosso driver Daniil Kvyat as he slipped down the order to 10th, three places behind Magnussen in seventh.

It marked the first double points finish of the season for the American squad – which has seen recent performances hampered by tyre-related issues – though Steiner knows the result could have been better without the coming together.

“I spoke to both drivers straight after the race, I wanted to clear the air,” Steiner explained.

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“We cleared the air, we are OK. It is neither here nor there and I told them ‘I’m not sitting here until midnight looking at videos to see who’s fault it is’.

“We need to learn from this and move forward. We got away quite lucky even if we lost some points, in the end we still had two cars in the points which is always good.

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“They have a good relationship between the two of them, they had that before and I wanted to make sure there is nothing said from one of them which upsets the other one, so I got them both straight after the race, we talked it through maybe for 15 minutes and we said ‘We move on from this and don’t do it again’.”

Steiner said it is not the first time he has had to warn his drivers and admitted he cannot guarantee the situation will not arise again in future races.

“We had this before but they are race car drivers,” he added. “I don’t want to go into detail about who did what and who did the other, because then we’re sitting here and you’ll have a different opinion and we’ll need to put the video up and I don’t want to do that.

“I think it looked worse than it was, the whole scenario, and that’s it. They accepted it. We looked at why, we agreed on that we are over it, we cleared the air. That’s fine, we move on like we were before.”

Magnussen summarised the clash by saying: “Obviously there was contact between me and Romain which is never what you want to see but nothing intentional, glad we still got both cars in the points.”

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Grosjean was coy about the incident, adding: “The re-start was a bit more complicated and not ideal for me.

“I lost a few positions in there, but yeah [I’m] happy with the way we acted this weekend, happy with the way we showed the car was fast.”