Grosjean starts year two strong for Haas while Magnussen struggles

Grosjean's performance gave Haas its best qualifying effort to date, bettering its previous best of seventh earned by Grosjean in Brazil last year. The Frenchman's whoop of joy on the radio attested to his satisfaction at the result.

"Happy day. It was quite an unbelievable qualifying session for us," said Grosjean. "It's a shame that we didn't get Kevin there, but the car is looking good, even better than what we've seen recently. We've made some good progress over the weekend. There's a lot more we can understand and analyze but, generally, it's a great start for us.

"It's always good to start with a strong qualifying session. It tells you that if you keep improving the car, you could be in a good place very soon. If that's our baseline, and you can fight between sixth and 10th position, where it's so tight, it would be great to be there most of the time and enjoy some good times.

"Tomorrow's start is a big unknown. We've been practicing and some have been good, others not so much. Hopefully, we'll get the first one right tomorrow."

Magnussen, meanwhile, ran wide at Turn 12 on consecutive laps in Q1. His best lap was a 1:26.847, placing him 17th. 

"Went off the track in Turn 12 on both of my laps – really annoyed with that," related Magnussen. "The car was there in qualifying. My lap was good until I went off. Both times my lap was good. I'm disappointed with that. We should've been a lot further up the grid. Now, I have to fight quite hard in the race. There's still a lot that can happen and I will give it my best tomorrow.

"The good thing is the car looks competitive. Romain made it to Q3, which shows the potential of the car. I'm pretty sure I could've been very close to that if I hadn't messed up and got off the track. I think I was just too keen to make up for my slow start to the weekend. I had a few places that I knew I had to sort out, and when you're in qualifying trying to sort out things like that, it's not optimal. It would've been nice to do that in practice, but that's the situation I was in and I messed up by going off the track two times.

"I went for it and twice it went wrong. The first time I did it flat out to see where the limit was and I went off. The second time I asked for a little bit more front wing and I went a bit slower to get it right, but I didn't get it right. It's very annoying when you see how good the car is. I'm gutted not to be up there and give myself a better chance at some points."