Guenther Steiner brushed off the idea of his Haas team's start to the 2022 season being unsustainable – but admits they should have done more to maintain results as the season went on.
Simply looking at the constructors' standings from last year, it looked like a great season for Haas. They had failed to score a single point in 2021, so to go from that to 37 points and eighth place in the championship looks like a great result.
But, while that is true to an extent, it could have been so much better. Kevin Magnussen's barnstorming return to F1 action saw him finish fifth in the Bahrain season opener and Haas added to those 10 points with five more by the end of the fourth race of the season.
They later enjoyed back-to-back double points finishes at the British and Austrian Grands Prix but, after that, only three more points would come in the final 11 races of the year. But team principal Steiner baulked at the suggestion it would have been impossible to maintain their strong start.
"No, I wouldn't say it wasn't sustainable," he told GPFans. "We started very well and then, for one reason or another, we lost a little bit of momentum. You can say, there was not one thing that was wrong."
Steiner also made the point that there were some things beyond their control which didn't go their way, most notably a handful of stewards' decisions which forced Magnussen to pit so repairs could be carried out on his car – all of which came when he was in a decent position to score points.
"How do you react to that?" the team boss asked. "And then, by the way, after 15 races it was decided not to use it [the black-and-orange flag] anymore, so it was things like this. Then a few times, with the strategy, we didn't do the right thing. Sometimes we were also a little bit off with the setup, with this bouncing effect.
"It was up and down. It was not just down because then we came back just before the summer break, and after the summer break we had a few good races. Put it this way, compared to last year [2021], we made a good improvement.
"But did we get everything out of it, what was available this year? By no means. When you are two years behind, you just need to again get used to being in this position. It's a weird thing, and then you plan and you try not to make mistakes but it takes some time that it gets all natural."
