11/06/2019
NEWS STORY
"Enough!" was the firm response from Guenther Steiner as Kevin Magnussen went full-on Comic Book Guy during Sunday's Canadian Grand Prix.
"This is the worst experience I've ever had in any race car ever," complained the Dane, and as his moaning eventually caused his engineer to point out that his crew had worked through the night building his car following his Q2 crash, eventually Steiner came over the airwaves.
"For us it's also not a nice experience," said the Italian. "It's enough now, that's what it means. Enough means enough!"
The Dane subsequently apologised to his team, while Steiner went on to reveal that in building the spare chassis for the race the team had taken advantage of the fact the car was not under parc ferme conditions and consequently made changes to the set-up.
"In the rebuild of Kevin's car we tried a little bit of a different set-up, because we could, because of the pitlane start," said Steiner.
"Obviously that didn't work," he added in a masterpiece of understatement.
"We know now," he continued, "at least we learned that one. It wasn't a conscious choice to make the car worse, the choice was to try to make it better, and it didn't work."
Referring to the radio rebuke, he said: "I said if it comes again I need to say something, then he came again, then the race engineer started to talk and I don't want an open discussion on the radio, what they think about, they need to stop it.
"You need to be strong sometimes, because I know when to stop them. I know only one can stop them. I know these guys pretty well. They listen, they know it's enough. If I speak, I have a different view of it, we don't need to do this on the radio with all you listening and having a good laugh at us.
"There are a lot of people who are disappointed with how we are doing at the track, and they don't need to be reminded,' he said, referring to his need to curb the negativity from Magnussen after the effort put in by his crew.
"He apologised to everybody on the radio after the race. It was good. Everybody is frustrated, the guys work until three in the morning and you're last, it's not something that motivates you, and you don't need any more discussions about how bad it is.
"I was fully conscious and what I wanted to avoid was the guys getting beaten down more than they need to be. He didn't mean to be critical, and he was just trying to explain a situation, that this was a very bad situation.
"I'm not blaming anybody. But when you're on the other side of the radio, you don't know that, and maybe I could understand it, but the guys do not know because they do not know the proper story, or what is happening. He apologised to everybody, like a grown up does, and you move on. There is no point to dwell over it."