British Grand Prix – Haas’ Romain Grosjean says he’s not attributing any blame either way after he and Kevin Magnussen made contact at Silverstone.
The two Haas drivers both retired early on in the race at the F1 British Grand Prix at Silverstone. Squabbling for position on the opening lap as they entered the Wellington Straight, the pair banged wheels with Kevin Magnussen attempting to overtake Grosjean around the outside.
Both immediately suffered damage, with Magnussen pitting at the end of Lap 1 for Hard tyres and a check over, while Romain Grosjean followed suit at the end of Lap 2.
“It’s difficult to say anything. Something touched my rear wheel and punctured me. That’s in a spot I can’t see, it’s a blind spot.” said Grosjean afterwards.
“The damage was too big to carry on, and we had to retire the car. I don’t really know what happened, it just felt like my rear tyre punctured on the straight. I was just doing my corner behind the two Alfas, staying on the racing line, and something touched my right rear tyre.”
“When the tyre delaminated, we had a lot of floor damage, a lot, due to the rear puncture. There was damage to the brake duct as well. The downforce loss was too big. I didn’t really feel the contact and I haven’t seen the footage yet so I’m going to go watch it now. The boss will call us in but from my point of view, there’s nothing I think I did anything wrong.”
With Haas running two different specification setups for Silverstone, with Grosjean running an old Australia spec in order to allow the team to do direct comparisons, the French driver says he feels the team have missed out on a good opportunity to get some representative data: “It’s a shame, because we wanted to do the comparison between the two cars over a race. It felt really good going to the grid and I had good hope for the race and obviously that was gone straight away.”
