Haas driver Kevin Magnussen is pleased with the impact the team’s upgrades have had despite a failure to score points in Budapest.
Haas arrived in Hungary with a completely new design on Magnussen’s car, and it has been dubbed the “white Ferrari,” largely due to the similarity of the sidepod design.
Magnussen was the only Haas driver to receive the changes due to the lack of spare parts the American side have available to them, so Mick Schumacher will have to wait until after the summer break to receive his new package.
Magnussen out-qualified his team-mate for the 11th time this season on Saturday, but began the race 13th as Schumacher qualified 15th.
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The Dane was making solid progress in the opening couple of laps of the race, but was given a black and orange flag for slight damage to his car taken on lap one.
He was thus denied the chance to truly show the race pace of the new car, and ended up in 16th, while Schumacher took 14th.
Determined to see the positives though, Magnussen was pleased with the effects of the upgrades over the course of the weekend.
“It’s good that we are upgrading and working the way we are and it doesn’t look like a failure, it looks more like a bullseye,” he said, quoted by Motorsport-Total.com.
“We’ve taken what we could from the weekend in terms of data and testing and I think we saw some positive things.
“We need to give it a bit more time so we can get some more performance out of it, but at least we brought an upgrade that does what we expected, we know the potential is there.”
Magnussen was there in 2019 when Haas seemed to fall backwards as the season went on despite a strong start in Australia.
The seed of doubt has been there for the team ever since when it comes to upgrades, particularly now when they are back in a position to score points.
There has been no regression this time though.
“At least it doesn’t look like we’ve taken a step backwards with it, my car seems a little bit better and that’s positive,” explained Magnussen.
The one tricky aspect was the changeable weather conditions with Friday hot and dry, FP3 held in a downpour on Saturday morning before drying up for qualifying and then the race taking place in cool conditions with rain seemingly never far away.
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“From a driver’s point of view it’s not easy when it’s like this and the wet practice didn’t help either, it just complicates your life.”
Haas remain seven points clear of AlphaTauri in the fight for seventh in the Constructors’ Standings after the Red Bull junior team also failed to score in Hungary.