Romain Grosjean says he isn’t surprised Haas became more competitive after they removed the upgrade they introduced at the Spanish Grand Prix.

He told media at the Hockenheimring he had never been satisfied with the aerodynamic package and told the team after his first run with it at the Spanish Grand Prix that he wanted to switch back to the old specification.

Grosjean eventually got his wish at the British Grand Prix where he out-qualified team mate Kevin Magnussen, who continued to use the new aerodynamic package. For Grosjean, that did not come as a surprise.

“When we brought the update on Friday in Barcelona I asked the team to revert back on Friday for the old spec,” he said. “Straight away my feeling was it was not working well and I really wanted to revert.

“[But] because on that Friday I was about two to three tenths faster than Kevin, the team thought the update was working well and that we were going to stay in that direction because all the sensors were showing that it was fine. Since that point onwards I’ve been asking to revert back to the old package.”

It took a “terrible race” in Austria to convince the team to switch Grosjean’s car back to the old bodywork, he explained. “On Friday I went in the car, had the feeling back from where it was in winter testing, you could really drive the car around very well.”

Grosjean believes he would have qualified inside the top 10 had his tyres not been incorrectly heated in the second part of qualifying. “Without that tyre blanket issue in Q2 we could have made it to Q3,” he said.

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“I was pleased with that, pleased with my feeling that was there since day one of the package. There’s a lot of sensors in a Formula 1 car but the driver’s still quite important and I was happy that all the experience I’ve had through the years, all the time I’ve been driving good cars and bad cars, is quite useful in the second senses.”

He said the promise shown by the old car explains why the team was so frustrated when he and Magnussen retired after colliding on the first lap of the race.

“Friday was probably the best Friday of the year in terms of pace,” he said. “So everybody hoped to score points.

“Lots of pressure on the team from what was happening and the fact that you discovered that the car which is five months older than the other one is actually going faster. I can understand that.

“Altogether it was just a volcano that was always going to explode.”

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2019 F1 season