Romain Grosjean thinks 14th on the grid represents the best Haas can currently do on a normal day after his qualifying effort for the Spanish Grand Prix.
After a frustrating Friday of practice for the team punctuated by struggles over set-up and car balance Grosjean made it through to the second qualifying session on Saturday afternoon.
Asked if it was a fair reflection of where Haas is on one-lap pace, the Frenchman replied: "Yeah, it looks like it. On a perfect day we can go close to the top ten, on a more difficult day the cut-off is Q2. So I think we need to find more performance, we can improve and definitely we need to understand in the two days of testing. But at the minute that's more or less where we are."
Grosjean had struggled with the balance of his car during Friday practice, prompting him to revert back to the set-up used in Bahrain -- the scene of his season-best fifth-place finish. During the two sessions on Friday Grosjean had labelled the car a "disaster" but he was encouraged by the big improvement made overnight for qualifying.
"It was much better than yesterday. We made some good set-up changes and reverted back on some philosophy choices we made recently. We made the new upgrade work pretty well, the new Ferrari engine worked very well as well, so all in all the engine went in a very good direction.
"It was very tight in timing in terms of go or not go into Q3. I think we are still on a learning curve and it's the first time we've had such high track temperature and we have to work with that, but generally I think we did a good job."