Haas investigating Grosjean brake disc failure
A better weekend for Romain Grosjean in this weekend’s Malaysian Grand Prix came to an abrupt end just seven laps into the race when a brake disc suddenly failed, sending the car into the gravel at the final hairpin.
The team admitted that the failure had come out of the blue and that it was investigating the reason.
“There was a brake failure,” said Grosjean. “We really don’t know what yet, but the pedal just went straight to the floor and I had to avoid the car in front of me. Our data didn’t suggest anything beforehand. It’s a shame.”
“[Romain] came to say the car was okay and everything was fine until the disc broke,” Haas team manager Guenther Steiner confirmed.
“A complete disc exploded, we don’t know why. We can see on the data some vibration before but no more than that so we have to investigate why the disc failed.
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“If the disc broke, what can we do? We need to get it right and understand why it broke, but it’s out of our hands because we don’t make the discs so we need to see what actually happened and we need to give the people who supply the disc a fair chance to analyse it.
“Carbon disc analysis is not easy, it’s quite a science project – there’s only dust left over! For this race you have an lot of dust, so it’s very difficult. We just need to see if there is anything obvious with any parts of the production or some place there, go from there.
“Whether we can do anything about it or put measures in place to check things is all we can do because before Japan we can’t get new brake discs – to make a brake disc takes about three months. But it’s the same gear we’ve used all year round, there’s nothing new.”
Steiner added that as frustrating as the team’s recent run of technical issues had been, it wasn’t affecting the team’s resolve.
“It’s not disappointing, we just need to keep on dealing with them,” he insisted. “We are grown-ups, it happens all the time, you show how strong you are when you’re down in the dumps to come out of it. We normally dig our way out, we work hard to get our way out.
“If this weekend on Friday somebody has said that Haas would end up 12th and 13th in qualifying then a lot of people would have laughed about it, but we got it done because we kept on working.
“The only thing to get out of this stuff is to keep on working. This is no miracle: we can say we’re unlucky but you make your own luck and you get lucky if you work hard. These things happen, analyse what it was and prevent it from happening again – and never give up.”
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