Haas boss Guenther Steiner says the team expected more issues in Barcelona this week but admits it still has a lot of fixes to make in the coming days.
Esteban Gutierrez completed a race simulation and finished Thursday with 89 laps to his name, eight more than the team's best individual tally from the week so far. The day did not come without trouble, however; Gutierrez's was delayed by a brake issue in the morning and then stopped on the red flag late in the afternoon due to an electronics problem, preventing a late run on soft tyres.
Steiner admits the team has repairs to do ahead of next week's tests but says he is surprised by how much running the team completed in its first four days.
"I think the list is pretty long what we have to fix to be honest and we are working on it," he said. "There are trucks leaving in the next three or four hours to fix stuff. For most of the stuff we have a solution, it's just time is the biggest issue to fix it all. But it's not like we are like 'woa, how do we fix this?'. So we are in pretty good shape. How much have we done from our list? Difficult to say because we don't know what is coming next week.
"We are pretty happy with the progress we have made in testing. We didn't anticipate we could get all this running in this week, to do our whole race distance was pretty cool today. That gives us a good feeling. We would have like to have put in a little bit of a fast lap in today with Esteban but we run out of time with the electronics issue. All in all we are pretty happy with what we did and for sure we would have been happy to have less problems, but on the other side we expected more of them or to run less."
Explaining the team's brake problem, and referring back to Monday's suspension failure, he said: "We had no suspension parts broken. We just overheated once the brake and we had the front wing problem but otherwise we didn't have a lot of problems [this week]. With these cars when you get the small problem it takes along time to fix, they are so complicated, that is the problem. The brake problem, to change the disc and to bleed the whole thing takes two hours and you've got eight hours of running time, so it seems a lot. So a small mistake -- it's not even a mistake, it's a small learning experience -- can end up in being two hours down.
"The mechanics are still learning the car. We are four days old so we are learning while we do it. I don't think that we have a lot of problems, we have got small problems but they take a long time to sort out. But suspension-wise we didn't have any problems [today]."