Image by Hone/LAT
Magnussen apologized to Haas for radio outburst
Kevin Magnussen apologized to his Haas team for the radio messages criticizing the handling of his car during the Canadian Grand Prix.
A heavy crash in qualifying meant Haas had to change Magnussen’s chassis overnight, resulting in a pit lane start. The team also took the opportunity to make a number of set-up changes in order to try and recover from the back of the field, but Magnussen struggled throughout and described it as "the worst experience I've ever had, in any race car, ever” on team radio, something team principal Guenther Steiner responded to at the time.
"It's not a nice experience, but enough is enough,” Steiner said.
After the race, Steiner says Magnussen apologized for his outburst.
“He apologized to everyone on the radio after the race,” Steiner said. “It was good he came over. Everybody is frustrated – the guys work until three in the morning, and you’re last and second-last. It’s not something that motivates you and you don’t need any more discussions [about] how bad it is.
“Everyone is fully conscious [of it], and what I wanted to avoid is the guy gets beaten down more than he needs to be. After the race, I don’t know if he explained it, he didn’t mean to be critical, he just tried to explain a situation that this was a bad situation, but not blaming anybody.
“When you’re on the other side of the radio, you don’t know that. Maybe I could understand it, but the guys do not know, because they don’t know the full story. He apologized to everybody, which is something a grown-up does. We move on, there’s no point to dwell on it."
Steiner feels Haas is still suffering from bad luck after Romain Grosjean had debris get caught in his Halo at Turn 1, causing him to miss the second corner and drop to the back of the field.
“I think we know [from qualifying] that we can’t catch a break. He wasn’t taken out, the wing was coming off and who does the wing hit? It was us. We are 19th and 20th at the start, and that’s not good. And our race pace wasn’t there as well.
“We could not say if that didn’t happen, we wouldn’t have been good. It’s one of these disastrous weekends which started in Q2 and didn’t finish since then. Only thing you can do is regroup and try to do better next time.”
Chris Medland
While studying Sports Journalism at the University of Central Lancashire, Chris managed to talk his way into working at the British Grand Prix in 2008 and was retained for three years before joining ESPN F1 as Assistant Editor. After three further years at ESPN, a spell as F1 Editor at Crash Media Group was followed by the major task of launching F1i.com’s English-language website and running it as Editor. Present at every race since the start of 2014, he has continued building his freelance portfolio, working with international titles. As well as writing for RACER, his broadcast work includes television appearances on F1 TV and as a presenter and reporter on North America's live radio coverage on SiriusXM.
Read Chris Medland's articles
Latest News
Comments
Comments are disabled until you accept Social Networking Cookies. Update cookie preferences
If the dialog doesn't appear, ad-blockers are often the cause; try disabling yours or see our Social Features Support.