F1: Haas must sort balance issues - Grosjean

Romain Grosjean says the Haas Formula 1 team must get to the bottom of a balance issue ahead of this weekend's Germany Grand Prix after being left baffled in Hungary.

After missing out on a place in the top 10 in qualifying for what would have been the first time this season by a tenth of a second, Grosjean's hopes of a points finish in Hungary disappeared due to poor strategy calls and car concerns.

Having begun the weekend with brake difficulties, Grosjean came out of it expressing frustration about his experiences with the balance.

"A lot of things went away from me, with the most disappointing being the balance of the car, which was not good," said Grosjean. "The balance was absolutely nowhere, and that's what I want us to understand before next week.

"After qualifying it's difficult to know exactly what happened, but clearly something in the race didn't go as planned, and we had problems we shouldn't have had.

"We just need to analyze because the car was very much on the nose in high speed, and I had a huge amount of understeer in low-speed corners. So we just need to make sure all the maps are correct, there is not something pushing the car, with the front behaving as it should when we turn the wheel. That is where we are going to focus, because it was very strange."

Grosjean was also concerned about Haas's tactics in Hungary.

"We didn't have a good strategy as well – we were often in a lot of traffic, and it was absolutely impossible to overtake around the circuit," he said. "At the first stop I came out behind a Manor, and I lost a lot of ground; the second stop I came out behind [Felipe] Massa and [Daniil] Kvyat, and I lost a lot of ground there as well. That sometimes happens, you cannot always get it right."

Team principal Gunther Steiner accepted the strategy was detrimental to Grosjean.

"The race didn't start on the right foot with the strategy, and when things start going downhill, it's usually pretty quick after that," he said. "Maybe people out-thought us. We came out in traffic, and on a track where you cannot overtake, that's how the day ended.

"Obviously we didn't do it on purpose. We're still learning with strategy because we got it wrong by just a few seconds."

Haas had no initial suggestion of what had caused Grosjean's balance concerns, but is looking into it ahead of Hockenheim.

"We didn't see anything strange on the car, so it will be stripped to see what is wrong," Steiner said.

Originally on Autosport.com