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While Red Bull led the 2023 F1 constructors' championship, Haas finished dead last in the table. Hence, the latter will get 540 more hours in the wind tunnel than the reigning world champions. Since wind tunnel testing is extremely important to every F1 team, getting these many hours more in it should be highly beneficial for the American outfit.
Here is a list of all the teams and the wind tunnel time allocation they received after 2023 (as per Last Word on Sports) :
- Haas – 1380 hours
- Stake F1 Team – 1320 hours
- AlphaTauri – 1260 hours
- Williams – 1200 hours
- Alpine – 1140 hours
- Aston Martin – 1080 hours
- McLaren – 1020 hours
- Ferrari – 960 hours
- Mercedes – 900 hours
- Red Bull – 840 hours
As soon as the wind tunnel hours surfaced on social media platform X (formerly Twitter), many F1 fans reacted to them. Haas was the focus of the list since it was getting loads of time compared to Red Bull. Most fans were quite pessimistic about the Kannapolis-based team's performance, even though they spent 1380 hours in the wind tunnel.
Here are some of the reactions from F1 fans:
"Lots of time to waste. I am sure Haas will burn it just fine"
"They stilll won’t be fast though."
Guenther Steiner on why Haas failed to squeeze performance from VF-23
Speaking to The Race, Haas team boss Guenther Steiner acknowledged that Haas' development progress in 2023 was extremely poor. He surprisingly claimed that there were no restrictions on money or effort, but that the team was simply unable to identify any way to increase performance.
“We got hit pretty badly with not making progress in development,” Steiner said. “We put all the effort in; there was no limitation on effort, and we had the budget to do upgrades. Everybody thinks we don't do upgrades because we don't have the money, but we didn't find any performance; that was the biggest thing.”
Steiner went on to say that failing to recognize a performance plateau early in the 2023 F1 season was another reason they were unable to make significant improvements with upgrades. He admitted that the team needed to improve in the testing conducted in the wind tunnel.
“And the other thing was that when we realised, it was a little bit late, and we should have caught that earlier. We just need to get better in the wind tunnel; otherwise, the team is not too bad. It could always be better, but it’s just that we didn’t find anything,” he added.
The American team only scored 12 points in the entire 2023 F1 season. In contrast, Red Bull amassed a staggering 860 points.
