Haas Torn Between Keeping Grosjean Or Signing Hulkenberg

One driver that has been clearly under-performing this season is Haas’ Romain Grosjean (8 points), trailing his teammate Kevin Magnussen by 10 points in the standings.

The team does have a solution in place, which is to replace the French driver with Nico Hulkenberg, who was recently set aside by Renault in favor of Esteban Ocon. However, this decision has proven to be rather difficult to make, reports Autosport.

According to team boss Gunther Steiner, neither him nor the team’s owner (Gene Haas) have been able to reach a verdict regarding next year’s driver lineup.

“If it was a clear decision it would be easy to make, we would agree immediately,” said Steiner. “We’re not sure what is the best, he is not, and I’m not. […] What we’ve got now is not bad, but can we make it better? How big is the risk that we want to make it better and it doesn’t go in the right direction?”

Steiner also wanted to be clear on the fact that there’s nothing Grosjean can do right now to influence their decision, in either direction – as the team already knows what he can bring to the table.

“That’s what I want to emphasize, we’re not going to judge Romain on race-by-race. For sure he needs to do a good result. For sure he knows what helps and what doesn’t help. It’s more where do we want to go with the team in the future? That’s the bigger decision.”

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The good news for Haas is that both drivers are likely to remain available should their decision making process take even longer than expected – they were supposed to make a decision this month and the clock is ticking.

“It is very difficult to decide what to do, therefore it takes a little bit longer,” added Steiner. “It’s not like ‘he good, is he not good?’ We know Romain pretty well, and I can see what Hulkenberg has done, so it’s more like what is fitting better in the bigger scheme of the team going forward than the race-by-race result.”

What’s obvious though is that Nico Hulkenberg has been much better this season than either of the two Haas drivers, so we definitely know which way we would lean if the decision was up to us.