Haas boss Guenther Steiner wishes the team had been more aggressive in its hunt for a solution to its lingering brake problems at the start of 2017, a situation he says cannot be allowed to continue into next season.
Haas has made a clear step forward in its second season on the grid but has struggled to find consistency from its Brembo brakes, an issue which dogged the team's debut campaign in 2016. The team has kept its options open this year by testing Carbon Industrie brakes throughout the season alongside Brembo, which continued to be split between drivers at last weekend's Italian Grand Prix.
Brakes have become such a recurring issue this season that Steiner has sarcastically labelled it his "favourite topic" at media sessions, often laughing and theatrically sighing when the issue is raised by journalists. With most of Haas' long-term focus now switched to it 2018 car, Steiner is determined to find a solution before the end of this season.
"That is the aim," Steiner told ESPN about having a solution in place for 2018. "We need to know which we go next year, that is the only aim now on the brakes, because it's getting old.
"We need to have a decision so we are well prepared for next year so we don't have this issue anymore. At the moment we are putting too much effort and wasting too much energy to try to sort something out which should be a non-issue.
"It's still development, I wouldn't say confidently 'oh, in three races we will have the solution'. We are working to it and it's looks like, but if we knew we would have put it on already. So we are getting closer but we have not found the solution yet."
After seeing how the issue has lingered throughout the year Steiner admits the team should have been more aggressive in how it went about searching for a solution at the turn of 2017, which coincided with a sweeping regulation change which complicated the situation further.
When asked if a more established team with better resources might have find a solution more easily, Steiner said: "I wouldn't say easily, but they would have come quicker to a solution, I cannot deny that.
"Maybe we should have reacted earlier, we waited a little bit and we were hoping [it could be solved]. I would say a bigger team, with the issues we have, they would have struggled as well but it would have taken them less to sort it out. We are a small team and we rely a lot... this part is Ferrari, and our resources are not up to the level of other teams so we had to bring our in-house resources up to deal with the problem, and that was a bit of a delay.
"We made some plans of how to do things and they didn't work out. We should have been more aggressive. From last year's testing we knew where we were going and then we had the delay because the supplier we wanted to work with were too busy because everyone changed to the new material because of the new regulation change. For sure they served their existing clients better than us, coming new and still needing to do testing, so we should have been more aggressive on the approach."