Gene Haas believes his team would be putting Williams under pressure in the constructors' championship had it cut out mistakes in its second Formula One season.
Haas's F1 team is already ahead of the 29 points scored in its rookie campaign, having scored 35 with seven rounds still to come. Despite an encouraging step forward this year the Ferrari-powered team has also suffered long-running brake issues which it has made a top priority to solve ahead of 2018, while it has sometimes struggled to understand its random fluctuations in form this year.
American team boss Haas feels his team would be above sixth-placed Toro Rosso and closer to Williams -- 20 points ahead in fifth -- had it not incurred so many self-inflicted setbacks this year.
Despite a 24-point lead over McLaren in ninth, Haas said: "I'm not comfortable with the points lead we have because I think in any given race we could drop back a position or two in the constructors' series because we're all so close. If anything, I feel a little bit on needles because our biggest problem is execution, minimising mistakes, that seems to be our worst area.
"We've had some component failures we've executed poorly and I think we've left 15 or more points on the table, even at this point. That's really where we need to perform is just running a race team with less mistakes, more consistency and that's what's going to earn us our points."
Haas is confident that, in Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen, his team have drivers who can seize the best points available each weekend.
"I think both of our drivers are very capable racers. I think that they're much much better racers than they are at practice and qualifying.
"I know Kevin has shown the ability to sometimes get two to three positions just at the start of the race so he's an aggressive driver. I think Romain's more reserved, he knows that you have to finish the race to get the points, so I think the combination of these two drivers bodes well for us in the race but we do need to finish the race."