Steiner confused by altering performance of VF-20

Haas team principal Guenther Steiner has admitted he is puzzled by the difference in pace in the car between the practice and the race.

Romain Grosjean finished Friday's first practice in sixth position, however, come the race on Sunday, the team could only manage fifteenth, courtesy of Kevin Magnussen, with Grosjean finishing the last of the running cars in nineteenth.

Steiner was confused as to how such a performance drop could happen, citing a loss of two seconds a lap during the race to the frontrunning cars.

He explained how the team will look over the data and try to come to some conclusion before F1 heads to Spa for the Belgian Grand Prix.

“We should put a little bit of a filter on these comments in the moment, it’s like the worst and the best, it’s easy to say,” Steiner told Autosport.

“We know we haven’t got the best car. And having the best car one day and the worst car the other day, I think we need to take it a little bit with a pinch of salt.

“We need to look at it why we lost so much performance from Friday to Sunday. I mean, the lap times on Friday, they were genuine. And today we could only lap two seconds slower than Friday. So that is very strange.

"We need to go to aero data and then see if we can find something, what it could be. But I’m not jumping to conclusions. The best, the worst, the medium and so on. I mean, we need to do some work.

"For sure, we haven’t got the best car. But we just need to try to understand why this big difference between Friday and Sunday suddenly was."