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This article first appeared in GP Racing magazine.
Sometimes you have to go backwards before you move forwards. That now is the seemingly counter-intuitive goal of the Haas team as it contemplates the implications of a miserably uncompetitive 2020, its worst season in Formula 1 to date.
Even before the season was supposed to begin, the team nursed concerns over the direction of development. Not only was it failing to make progress, it was actively going backwards as new components failed to influence car performance as expected. Once racing finally resumed in July there was no respite, just a continuation of the slide towards the back of the grid.
Its solution to that has been drastic: it stopped development completely in 2020 and has been painstakingly working its way backwards through the design timeline to establish where things started to go wrong, the aim being to understand how the divide between theory and practice opened.
