Haas’ Esteban Gutierrez has described his race as a difficult one after having a race of two halves in Monaco.
The Mexican was in the top ten in ninth place after the first 30 laps of the race, and it looked good for his first points scoring finish for Haas. However, he says that the car felt different in the drier conditions when slick tyres emerged around lap 31 to 33 and that meant that he fell down to a final finishing position of 12th.
With Williams’ Valtteri Bottas receiving a ten-second time penalty after finishing 11th, Gutierrez moved up to 11th in the final classification. This is his joint best finish of the season after also finishing in this position in Spain.
“It was a pretty difficult race,” Gutierrez said.
“I have mixed feelings, as the first part was very good. We had a really great pace in the wet.
“However, when we changed to the ultra-soft, I was struggling to get the confidence from the car. It started to be a bit difficult and in Monte Carlo, when you don’t have the confidence, it pulls you back quite a lot.”
Despite this problem, Gutierrez was pleased that he could learn more about the performance of his car as he finishes just outside the points for a second successive race and gets ever closer to his first points finish since the 2013 Japanese Grand Prix.
“Overall, I think there are a lot of things we can learn as a team to try and find more consistency and understand the tyres better, which was the main focus from today.”
Despite the race not giving him points, this does mean that he moves ahead of Renault’s Jolyon Palmer for 18th in the Drivers’ Championship as he has the best two finishes of a driver to not yet score points in 2016 and Palmer has only finished 11th once.
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