In March, the racers from the Haas team had the best team qualifying performance ever. They were then set to start the Formula 1 Australian from fifth and sixth places. This actually exceeded Hass's expectations when they qualified both cars for the Grand Prix in the top seven.
“The car was nice to drive in qualifying,” said Kevin Magnussen. “It was just there and performing. I was able to push brake points — get off the brakes earlier and earlier with every lap. It wasn’t doing anything unexpected, which was really nice. I’m looking forward to tomorrow starting in P5."
There is no doubt that both Haas racers were truly excited about the achievement. The team was considered the dark horse of the Australian Open.
“We have some quick guys behind us, and we’ll have to do well to keep it that way. We’ll be doing all we can to get a good result. We need a solid start to the season and we need to capitalize on today’s qualifying result,” Magnussen added.
On his end, the other Haas runner, Romain Grosjean praised the efforts of the entire team to help them get to the Grand Prix.
“Everyone’s very happy and it reflects the hard work from everyone on the team,” Grosjean said. “Our result confirmed a little bit what we saw in winter testing. I can push the car as much as I want, which obviously makes me very happy. It was a good job by Kevin (Magnussen) as well — getting both cars into the third row of the grid tomorrow."
The team really managed to turn heads and impress everyone in the preseason testing Feb. 26-March 9 at Circuit de Barcelona – Catalunya. During this testing time, Kevin Magnussen put down a lap of 1:18.360. This ended as being the sixth best overall time achieved during the eight days of training. Unfortunately, this was just a test; the real competition goes for the F1 Australian Grand Prix.
