MEXICO CITY — Kevin Magnussen’s disqualification from the U.S. Grand Prix was because Haas took “too much risk” on fuel consumption due to its fight with Renault for fourth in the championship.
Magnussen slammed “Formula Fuelsaving” after being kicked out of the result of the Austin race last weekend when his car have used 170 grams more the 105 kg fuel limit for a race. Magnussen lost two points from the disqualification as Renault drivers Nico Hulkenberg and Carlos Sainz finished sixth and seventh to open up the gap over Haas to 22 points with three races left.
Explaining what happened, Steiner said: “Just ran too high at the risk. We tried to attack Ocon and it didn’t work out. Even if we had passed him we could had save afterwards more but we kept on attacking. We just ran too much risk, it was our own fault.”
When asked if the mistake was caused by the fight with Renault, he said: “A fight can never be too tight, in my opinion. That makes it interesting. That it why we race. I think that’s the reason we did this — if we would be safe in fourth or impossible to catch fourth, why would we take this risk?
“So that is why racing is what it is. Racing should be racing, in my opinion. We run hard because we wanted to achieve something. We ran out.”
In the final laps Haas had hoped Magnussen and Sergio Perez would be caught and passed by race leader Kimi Raikkonen, as that would have relegated them off the lead lap, but the Ferrari driver had to save fuel in the final laps too. Steiner does not think letting Perez through to conserve fuel and consolidate tenth position would have been the right thing to do.
“Raikkonen was behind for two laps almost lapping us but I think he had to save fuel as well. He couldn’t attack anymore. If he would have got Perez into the blue flag we would have achieved what we wanted to achieve, but it was just blinking blue flag, he never got blue flag. The one time you wanted the blue flag to come on, it doesn’t come on!
“There is a lot of things that happened in a very short period of time and it’s like a strategy, with hindsight you can always do things better. I’m not trying to find an excuse, we took too much risk and it went this way. But there is a point where you need to attack, you cannot always just sit behind and see what is happening, you know? We did it and lost out on it, we take the responsibility and move on and try to do better here. There is a regret yes but there’s no regret on what we actually did.”
Magnussen was conserving fuel as requested in the final laps but was unaware of how close the team was to the limit in the final stages of the race.
“He did what he needed to do, it wasn’t down to him because he cannot see the numbers — it’s just ‘lift and coast, lift and coast’, the numbers we see how much he has to do. The driver, you cannot blame him he didn’t do enough, because then when he gets overtaken it would be ‘why didn’t you push a little bit more’. It’s one of those things. The number we see, not him, so I don’t blame him for it.”