Haas alter pit crew following Melbourne blunders

Haas F1 team has changed up the roles of its pit crew for this weekend's Bahrain Grand Prix, following the heartbreak it suffered two weeks ago at Melbourne. Haas was on for a strong score of points, running in fourth and sixth before two pit stop mistakes forced both cars into retirement.

The team was also fined €10,000 for the unsafe release of both cars. Haas appears to have started the 2018 season at the front of the mid-field, ahead of the big names of McLaren and Renault. Speaking in the paddock on Thursday, team principal Guenther Steiner explained the reasoning behind the pit crew rotation.

“We swapped a few positions and the main reason is not because they did a mistake but to get their confidence back," he said. "If you keep on doing the same and the guy is not confident, the risk you have a mistake is high. You swap positions, you give them different jobs, because you need so many people anyway. That is what we did for this race and what we are doing since yesterday practising.

“The guys who feel most of the pressure, you tell them to do another position for a few races to get their confidence back up. The last thing you want after an event like last week is to have low confidence in anybody, because then mistakes will happen again.

“We started practising yesterday and will try to do as much as possible until the race. There's a fine balance between doing too much, because it's also physical. If people are tired, there's no point to do it, because then they are not focused and they just lose their confidence again.

“It's for the team manager to decide when that point [of doing too much] is reached, but we are going back to do as much, like we did last year, as we can which we didn't do in Australia.”