Haas reverts to Brembo brakes for remainder of Russian GP

The American outfit has been experimenting with brake materials in a bid to make improvements in an area of the car that it had found particularly hard to perfect.

But although tests with the CI products have been encouraging, issues with cooling of the new discs have prompted the team to elect to take make more time before committing to them for a race weekend.

Speaking before the decision to go back to Brembo was made on Friday night, team principal Gunther Steiner said that the brake situation remained a work in progress for his outfit.

"We are still not completely on top of how to manage the brakes, and therefore it was a test session for us," he said. "You saw the brake dust coming out when braking – but we knew that after the Bahrain [test] and we are working to have more cooling options.

"In parallel we are developing more cooling options for the brakes, so we will be fine. It just takes a little bit of time to get used to them."

Haas plans further wind tunnel tests to get on top of the brake cooling requirements next week.

Grosjean messages

Romain Grosjean has regularly complained about the feel of the brakes, and faced difficulties again on Friday in Sochi especially with durability.

"The car balance wasn't great," said the Frenchman. "I wasn't happy all day long with it, we had some issues with the brake as well on the long run, with the brake pedal going [long] I think we can sort that out, we've got some ideas, but generally the car didn't perform at all.

"But Formula 1 is all about finding the last fine-tuning. We got better recently, we were very happy with Carbone Industrie in Bahrain, but here we're struggling a bit more. So we need to work on it."