Gutierrez left to rue missed opportunity at Monza
Esteban Gutierrez and the entire Haas F1 Team were left to rue another near miss to a points scoring finish as the team saw its cars finished the Italian Grand Prix in 11th and 13th positions. Esteban Gutierrez' chances for instance were quickly ruined as he completely missed his start and dropped to 20th by the first corner.
“Here we go again with an 11th- and a 13th-place finish", said Gunther Steiner, Haas team principal after the race.
"I think once we got going, it was a pretty good race. If you take off the first 20 seconds of it, we could have been in a different position with Esteban. He missed the start, and that put him back, but he recovered to finish 13th."
Steiner hinted to media after the race that the pressure got to Gutierrez, and denied it was a problem with the car that caused the difficult start.
"It was a driver problem, missing the start," said Steiner. "I guess the pressure got to him. It's a missed opportunity for us but also for him. These positions, they are hard to get as the field is quite set now."
Having qualified in the top 10 for the first time this season, Gutierrez was obviously upbeat after qualifying, thanking the team for its efforts, even though it failed to materialise on race day.
“It was a very disappointing start to the race losing a lot of positions", the Mexican said.
"It was very tough to recover, but I did my best. I struggled in the first stint with the overall pace, starting with the scrubbed tires from qualifying and fighting with people which were on new tires. It wasn’t very easy, but we kept ourselves together and pushed really hard to recover everything we could, but what we lost in the beginning was too much to get back to where we started.
This troubled start made Grosjean come closest to the points as the Frenchman progressed from 17th on the grid to 11th. It could have been much simpler of course if it would not have been necessary to replace his car's gearbox after FP3 on Saturday.
"Romain came from 17th to 11th with a good strategy and good driving and, overall, it was a good effort. Unfortunately, none of the big boys dropped out, so we ended up 11th again. We showed that we have some speed at this kind of track.
"Hopefully, we can bring that forward to some of the upcoming tracks we visit. Being ahead and fighting with McLaren is something we can be proud of. McLaren is a team that’s been around a long time, and we’re the newcomers.
"Fighting with them and racing with drivers of the caliber of Button and Alonso makes us proud. But, we still haven’t got any points from today.”
