Haas expects its car to struggle in the medium-speed corners of the the Red Bull Ring

Formula One's American outfit, Haas is heading to this weekend's Austrian Grand Prix with concerns, fearing that the Red Bull Ring might expose the weaknesses of its 2024 F1 car.

The American team's race engineer Mark Slade expressed his fears that the medium-speed corners of the Red Bull Ring might cause an issue for Haas as its VF-24 struggles in this type of corners.

However, with the Styrian track featuring a mixture of corners, Slade thinks that Haas might be competitive if it can balance out the disadvantage suffered in the medium-speed corners with the low-speed corners where the VF-24 has performed well so far.

“One of the main things about the Red Bull Ring is that it’s a very short lap so it gets busy, particularly in practice and qualifying. It’s a nice mixture of low-, medium-, and high-speed corners, and obviously in a spectacular setting so it looks amazing, and it does provide quite a significant challenge for us when setting the car up.

"We’ve had some issues with medium-speed corners, so we’re expecting to have to manage that, it’s going to be a challenge for us, but on the other hand in low-speed corners, we’ve generally been very good at them and we think we’ve taken a step forward in high-speed corners recently. We’ll see how we get on, but we’ve got a plan of course."

Expanding on the condensed nature of the sprint format, Slade said: “There is a lot of extra work for a Sprint, especially in amongst a triple-header, but it also makes it very interesting, it’s all a part of Formula 1.

"You have to be realistic that you’re not going to be able to do everything you’d like to do with one practice session, so you have to pick the most important points that you think are relevant to getting the best out of the car in both the Sprint and the race and work to achieve those objectives – it’s a very compressed, highly edited run plan.

"The format of a Sprint is different from previous years, so you can afford to be a little bit more experimental in the Sprint race because points only go to eighth place, and realistically we’re chasing that last points-paying position so it means we can try things that we wouldn’t necessarily have tried, knowing we can change things for the race.”

Nico Hulkenberg scored points at last year's Austrian Grand Prix, and hopes to carry over that form for this weekend's Spielberg round.

“It’s a short track that packs in a lot of fun. The length of the circuit means it bunches us all up over qualifying, which is a challenge, but we have two opportunities as it’s a Sprint.

Last year I scored points around the Red Bull Ring, so I know it can be done, and we want to be back scoring points, so that’s the mission in Spielberg.”

His team-mate Kevin Magnussen expects that his car will be competitive given the long straights of the Red Bull Ring.

“It’s a fun track; I’ve got some good memories from the Red Bull Ring, that’s where we’ve had our best team result so I’m looking forward to going there again.

"We have quite an efficient car so hopefully with our good straight-line speed we can be good there. There’s still a fair number of high-speed corners, which is perhaps not our strength, but we seem to be pretty consistently good at most tracks. I’m just looking forward to a fun Sprint weekend.”