Kevin Magnussen will have new parts on his Haas car at this weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix, but team-mate Mick Schumacher will have to wait for his, according to Autosport.
While Schumacher has often shown tremendous pace since the start of his career last season, he has also been involved in several crashes, including two this year in Jeddah and Monaco.
The budget, initially, was tighter this season at $140 million per team, but this has been raised back to $145 million – the same as last season – because of fears over inflation.
This is just as well, because Schumacher’s crash in the second round of the season in Saudi Arabia already exhausted the team’s damage repair budget, which means that upgrades have to be spread out more thinly this year.
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The stringency of the budget cap means that the American side scarcely have the scope to repair one damaged car between now and the end of the season, let alone two, so they need to be extremely cautious with upgrades.
As a result, it appears that Magnussen will be the only driver receiving anything new next weekend, because the team do not have the materials or the money to upgrade both at the moment.
“There is only one car having the upgrade and then the spares will be very lean even for that car,” team principal Guenther Steiner told Autosport.
“You know, everything came late, we had a lot of accidents this year.
“So all the materials were used up a lot to do that one, and then we started late also, we postponed it from France to [Hungary].”
Initially, Haas were reluctant to bring anything new in until after the summer break, but Budapest will be a good chance to compare the two concepts and see which direction they need to go in for the rest of the year.
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“In the beginning they said we cannot do it anymore until Spa, and everybody really pushed to have at least one set for Budapest so we get some data and can analyse it then for when we get going again after the break,” added Steiner.
“And then if it doesn’t work we always can go back to what we had before, we have got a good plan in place, well organised.
“The only thing is we are pretty lean on spares even for one car, so if anything happens on Friday…”
Haas appeared to have the pace to score points during the French Grand Prix, and Magnussen made it into Q3 on Saturday before his engine penalty was applied and he started from the back.
It also looked as though Schumacher could make it into the top 10 shootout, but his final lap in Q1 was deleted when he cut Turn Three, so he started the race 17th.
The pair tried to make progress in the race, but got caught in traffic before Schumacher suffered contact with Zhou Guanyu, and Magnussen was involved in a collision with Nicholas Latifi.
The Dane eventually retired from the race along with Latifi and Zhou, while Schumacher ended up down in 15th.