F1: Grosjean puzzled by test incident

Romain Grosjean is unsure what caused his off that led to the morning session of Formula 1 testing at Barcelona on Thursday being red-flagged just before the mid-day lunch break. The Haas driver slid off track at Turn 4, running through the gravel and coming to a stop just before the tire barrier.

"We are trying to investigate [what happened]," said Grosjean. "I locked the front wheel and went straight – luckily we stopped before the wall. So a bit of cleaning unfortunately, and we'll try to understand what happened."

While Haas bounced back from a disastrous day on Wednesday when Esteban Gutierrez completed just one lap, Grosjean said the team still wanted to complete more than the 59 laps it managed in the morning.

"We had some issues early in the morning, I don't know what they were, and then we went for a long run because we want to put in mileage," he said. "We managed to go quite long on the tires, which was good, so hopefully we can do a much longer run this afternoon.

"This morning the [engine] maps were not 100 percent perfect and I was struggling a bit with the car. We need to give it a bit more time and laps and we will get it all together.

"It certainly doesn't help when you've got eight days and you miss two, but we are trying to catch back up. We are a new team so there is a lot to learn. There are a few areas where we can massively improve but in the rest we are up there."

Grosjean said Haas will not get around to performing any qualifying-style runs before the Australian Grand Prix weekend.

"[We need] more long runs to see which parts are not strong," he said. "A qualifying run would be good but that's only going to come in FP3 in Melbourne."

He is also unsure if he will have to share any of the remaining track time in Spain with Gutierrez to make up for the Mexican's lost running.

"I don't know," Grosjean said of the prospect of handing the car back to Gutierrez. "This morning we lost almost three hours before we started, so we will discuss."

Originally on Autosport.com