Haas has reshuffled its pit crew and introduced an extra fail-safe system to try to prevent a repeat of its Australian Grand Prix pitstop blunders.
Botched pitstops for both Kevin Magnussen and Romain Grosjean cost Haas a likely double top-six finish in the first race of the new F1 season, and team boss Gunther Steiner blamed a lack of practice for the errors.
Ahead of the second race of the season in Bahrain, Haas has altered its procedures to try to ensure there is no repeat of the mistakes.
Steiner said: “We swapped a few positions [between pit crew], and the main reason is not because they did the mistake, but getting their confidence back.
“If you keep on doing the same and the guys are not confident, the risk that you have a mistake again is high, so we swapped positions.
“You pair different people and give them different jobs, because you need so many people anyway, and that is what we did for this race, and that is what we are doing since yesterday practicing.”
As well as moving one of the Melbourne wheelgun men to a new position, an extra person will be assigned to act as a secondary fail-safe to override the team’s automatic release system should an unexpected problem crop up.
Steiner said this team member would be in contact with the drivers to tell them to stop if a problem is detected in the release phase that has not been spotted before the car moves away.
“We put an additional person in, so that if it isn’t caught we can stop the car, push it back and put it right,” Steiner added.
Steiner also said that the team would be going back to the levels of pitstop practice it put in last year – having not put enough effort in for Australia.
“We’re just putting in as much as possible – as long as the guys you can see they are physically comfortable to do it,” he explained.
“As soon as they get tired you don’t learn anything – except you wear them out.
“It’s for the team manager to decide when that point is reached. But we are going back to do it like we did last year, which we didn’t do in Australia.”