Kevin Magnussen has expressed his excitement over the Red Bull-inspired upgrade Haas will debut at the United States Grand Prix this weekend.
It’s been a trying season for the American-registered operation with its car proving difficult to upgrade.
That has seen Haas adopt, according to Guenther Steiner, a more ‘Red Bull’ concept.
Steiner has previously described the upgrade as the biggest change in the history of Haas in F1.
“It’s not to see the upgrade on the car, finally,” Magnussen enthused.
“We haven’t had many upgrades to the car this year.
“It’s been a tough year in terms of just finding performance, the guys have really been struggling this year to make gains on the car we’ve had.
“This upgrade is an exciting one because it’s very different on paper,” he added.
“It’s not actually meant to be more downforce as such, but it’s a new concept and it’s hopefully the concept that we’ll be using for next year’s car.”
While it’s proved a difficult campaign in terms of results on Sunday, Magnussen and team-mate Nico Hulkenberg have shown well in qualifying.
That is a by-product of the VF-23s inherent weakness; it is especially hard on tyres which translates to good warmup and single lap pace, but that quickly falls away.
“A big problem with our car this year has been that it doesn’t treat the tyres very well in the race,” Magnussen explained.
“So we often will just struggle with tyre life in the races.
“The pace that other people are able to maintain, we seem to fall off much more.
“Although you’re not putting extra downforce on, like peak downforce, if you can better the characteristics through corner balance, hopefully the structure and the strength of the [air]flow on the car, that could solve that issue, or help that issue.”
