Why Formula 1 needs Haas to succeed

You have the sixth fastest car on average - on its best days the fourth quickest - but are only ninth in the constructors' championship.

You have a pair of drivers with a magnetic attraction to each other on track and an unwillingness to take responsibility for avoiding clashes.

You can't work the Pirelli tyres properly and that appears to be at the heart of your problems. But you can't rule out the possibility of a serious aerodynamic flaw, leading to extreme experimentation - with one driver running the latest car specification and the other running the one used for the season-opening Australian Grand Prix - in the middle of the season.

Oh, and your title sponsor has become embroiled in a hilarious, and very public, farrago that results in the termination of the deal, just to add to the chaos. You are Gunther Steiner, Haas team principal. Tough gig.

The serious problem, the one most vexing, is the one of performance. The Haas is a fundamentally quick car and has been since the start of pre-season testing, yet in qualifying it's hit and miss and in dry races it usually goes missing even after promising starts. The drivers complain that, at times, it feels like driving in the wet when on a bone-dry track.

The revised Pirelli compounds have taken the blame, yet engineers at rival teams privately scoff at suggestions it's all down to a tyre lottery because there is science underpinning this challenge - albeit with a very narrow window to aim for. So, has the team's tyre treatment gone completely awry, has its aerodynamic department gone wrong, or is it a bit of both?

F1 cars are complex beasts so the answer is 'both', and probably a lot more besides.

Troubleshooting is not an easy task because while a problem might be identifiable, is it symptom or cause? Working out what is going wrong is the start, understanding the why is key. And then you must come up with a fix. Three weekends running different specifications - Romain Grosjean driving effectively a car that's more than four months out-of-date and Kevin Magnussen the latest version - offered signposts, but Haas is still all over the place. The experiments continue, with Grosjean using the new specification for Spa, Monza and the upcoming race in Singapore, then due to return to a mix-and-match hybrid version using chunks of the old spec in Russia.

One works better in warmer conditions (the old spec), one in cooler conditions (the new). Twice in the last three races before the summer break, Magnussen's performance plummeted from Q1 to Q2 by a margin that can't be explained by variation in driving.

Grosjean, meanwhile, put the old car in Q3 twice during that same run of grands prix, but couldn't convert for points in Hungary and arguably only did so in Germany thanks to the conditions. Grosjean was a strong points contender for the first half of the race at Spa before fading, while Magnussen found the car dire on the soft tyres but much better on the mediums later in the race. Puzzling.

By F1 standards, Haas is a small team, which is possible thanks to a technical alliance with Ferrari that allows it to use as many 'non-listed' parts as possible - therefore meeting the minimum required level to be considered a constructor. In its early years, Haas struggled to match the analytical power of the big teams and often failed to recover if race weekends went wrong.

It's possible this new problem is also challenging that capability. Data doesn't offer answers, you have to manipulate it to find those. The temperature variation is indicative of something, perhaps that it's related to the performance of the floor given the sensitivity of anything close to the ground in different conditions, and Haas desperately needs to understand the weakness it has engineered in to avoid repeating it in 2020.

The driver line-up is also a problem,
 beyond even the fact they repeatedly clash on track and blame each other.

Grosjean remains a maddening performer, as quick as anyone when everything is right. But the flipside of the Grosjean coin is the capacity for errors and struggles with an understeering car.

Kevin Magnussen is perhaps a couple of tenths slower than peak Grosjean, but is more consistent and a more rounded driver than
 he was in his pre-Haas days.

It now seems likely Haas will change one of its drivers for next year, which is bad news for Grosjean, who is on a one-year deal, and good news for Magnussen and his longer-term contract. But Grosjean is the one who has forced the issue by insisting he revert to the Melbourne specification car and, as a result, proved without question there is a problem with the car that has either been introduced, or most likely worsened, by subsequent updates. That insight might save Haas's season.

Haas would benefit from an absolutely proven, consistent quantity. Sergio Perez would have been the ideal driver, one capable of delivering consistently, with a rock-solid track record in F1's midfield. But he's committed to Racing Point.

The choice the team is now making is between retaining Grosjean and signing Renault refugee Nico Hulkenberg. While the seat is seemingly there for the taking for Hulkenberg, the emotional ties to Grosjean are strong and he does still have a lot to offer.

The stakes are high for Haas. Established ahead of the 2016 season by Gene Haas as a means to promote his machine tools business, the intention was always to make the team self-sustaining. Sponsors haven't been falling over themselves to sign up, so the Rich Energy situation is a big problem.

The question is how long will Haas himself be willing to make up the shortfall between income and budget, which stands at tens of millions of dollars?

Haas's on-track problems mean the target of finishing fourth in the constructors' championship is not on this year. The difference between target and the reality, currently five places, could, depending on F1's overall revenue for 2019, be more than $15million.

That could mean big trouble for a business model that depends on a lean, mean, efficient team of less than 300 when it comes to signing up for 2021 and beyond.

This is all bad news for F1. Haas is a poster child for new teams aspiring to join the championship. While the previous new wave in 2010 - HRT, Virgin (Marussia/Manor) and Lotus (Caterham) - all fell with a total of two points finishes between them, Haas has shown that sustained success is possible. How can it be that F1 doesn't allow a team that has done this well to be on firm, break-even ground?

This is the problem for F1 - and it should be. Despite this year's problems, Haas has done a superb job and brought two competitive machines to the grid. By the measures of new teams, it has achieved far more than any other would be expected to do in its first three-and-a-half seasons.

F1 needs it to work, far more than Gene Haas himself needs it to...