Aston Martin, Haas start from pits in Austin

AUSTIN, Texas — Both Aston Martin drivers and both Haas drivers are set to start the U.S. Grand Prix from the pit lane in order to make changes to their setups under ferme conditions.

F1’s sprint format, which is being used for the fifth time this year this weekend, means teams have just one practice session in which to understand their cars and decide on a setup for the race.

As soon as Friday’s qualifying starts, car specifications and setups are locked in place to prevent teams developing one specification of car for qualifying and a different one for the race.

Haas and Aston Martin both brought upgrades to their cars but struggled for performance, with Haas qualifying 14th and 16th and Aston Martin 17th and 19th.

Lance Stroll retired from the race with brake issues, which had also limited him to five laps in practice, meaning Aston Martin felt the need to make setup changes to both cars.

“In FP1 because of a mistake on the simulator we put too much blanking on the front brakes so they effectively caught fire,” Aston Martin deputy technical director Eric Blandin said. “That’s why we couldn’t run more than two [flying] laps with Lance in the morning and that really put us in the backfoot for the whole weekend.

“In FP1 we couldn’t really optimise the set-up of the car with the new package and as a consequence we are I think the car is far from its optimum set-up with the new package.”

Blandin said Aston Martin would not run the upgrades on Fernando Alonso’s car in order to compare specifications and gain a better understanding of the new parts.

“We learned the package is performing as we were expecting but we haven’t been able to optimise the set-up so we will start both cars from the pit lane,” he added. “We are effectively changing the set-up, we think there is a lot more performance to come from the car.

“But we took the pragmatic approach to start both car with, one with the Qatar spec, and one with the new package. So Lance is going to have the new spec, Fernando will have the Qatar-spec.”

Source: www.espn.com