Haas F1 Team acknowledges its tough Chinese GP was a reality check

Romain Grosjean finished a surprise sixth in the season-opening Australian GP and followed that up with fifth in Bahrain.

But its third F1 race in China proved to be more of a struggle, with Esteban Gutierrez crossing the line 14th for his first finish of the year.

Grosjean was 19th after losing his front wing in a collision with Marcus Ericsson at the first corner.

Haas did, however, see both cars cross the line for the first time in its short history and it retains fifth in the constructors' championship.

"It's a reality check but I think quite a good one," said Steiner. "We know where we are now.

"It's like we always said, we will be in that area, around 10th because without the problem on Romain's car he would have been up there with the McLarens.

"It's reality but it was good for us because we finished with two cars, and it's not to finish with two cars but to run two cars because before we had the luxury of having a whole team for one car.

"Now we need to get used to running two cars and that was quite challenging with a lot of tyre changes, we didn't make mistakes in the pit stops."

Steiner added that Gutierrez's progress was stunted because "he couldn't open his DRS so he got stuck behind people".

Grosjean, who celebrated his 30th birthday on race day, described the race as "horrific" and said the result brought the team "down to earth".

But he tried to remain positive adding: "It's normally in the toughest situations that you learn.

"On Sunday, we came down to earth but Formula 1 is a complicated world and there are a lot of things going on.

"Since Friday morning I was not happy with my car at all. We need to analyse why. We've tried a few things and obviously we never got it completely right.

"It will be interesting to understand what's the difference from Bahrain, why we're down.

"There are a lot of things we can understand and analyse.

"Changing the front wing was not quick enough, the front tyre degradation was bad, quite a lot of things that we can understand.

"Even though it was a shit race for us, on the other side it is going to be very positive to analyse everything from the Friday morning to the end of the race."