With tester Antonio Giovinazzi crashing early on in first practice, and Romain Grosjean struggling with brakes and a baffling balance problem, Steiner is under no illusions about how much his outfit is now on the back foot.

“It is the most difficult one of Haas F1 – including last year,” Steiner about the Friday running. “Ever. I don’t think we ever struggled this much.”

He added: “The balance is all over the place, and we didn’t have a second car to give us data because the second car was destroyed. Then it is going down in a spiral.

“It was miserable. On all fronts. Whatever we did was miserable. Not a lot more to say.”

Steiner said that such had been the extent of Grosjean’s woes that he did not even have time to get to the bottom of Giovinazzi’s crash – or speak to the Italian at length before he departed for Maranello to run on Ferrari’s simulator.

Reflecting on Grosjean’s difficult day, Steiner said: “Just no balance. One of these days with no balance. It goes from no grip from the front to no grip at the rear. It was just brutal today. It was brutal. It was miserable today.

“We are at the point where it is very difficult and then you fall back, as you see. We went out with our supersofts to try to do a qualifying run. Then everybody is on high fuel load and you get stuck in traffic. It is just a downward spiral. We will try to rescue what we can for tomorrow.”

Back to Brembo

As well as the balance problems, Grosjean again had struggles with his brakes – which prompted him to revert to Brembo.

And after having appeared to make good progress with the Carbone Industrie tests in Silverstone, Steiner said it was especially annoying that brakes had become a topic again.

“It is frustrating because in Silverstone we were happy, although Silverstone is not a brake circuit,” he said.

“With all the trouble we have got, we have no time to develop brakes now so we just said: ‘let’s go back to Brembo and forget about a second set of CI or anything. We just need to be rational and try to get out of the hole we got ourselves in this morning.”