Kevin Magnussen hopes Haas can maintain its current level of competitiveness after winning the midfield battle in qualifying in Melbourne.
Haas ended qualifying at Albert Park as Formula One's 'best of the rest' with Magnussen and teammate Romain Grosjean set to the start the race from fifth and sixth, moving up one place from their original qualifying positions due to Daniel Ricciardo picking up a penalty for speeding under red flags in Friday practice.
The Dane doesn't expect Haas' advantage over midfield McLaren and Renault to remain for the duration of the season as both teams are likely to move ahead in the development race due to the disparity in resources and infrastructure.
"It's not something I focus hugely on but I would love to beat them. It would be a great thing to beat those two teams of course," Magnussen said.
"It's going to be a massive challenge. I say those comments with a smile on my face but it's going to be very, very difficult. I've been to those teams and I have huge respect for them and I know what they're capable of so they're not going to be easy to up-form and it's going to be very, very difficult to have a better season than them and to beat them in the championship. At the moment, in this track, in this qualifying, we've had a better package.
"That shows that it can be done. But we're now in the season, there's a lot of things to do now. Our team is a small team, there's a lot of things to focus on certainly and I wouldn't be surprised if they were very, very strong from now and catch up very quickly. I'm just trying to capitalize as much as we can on this right now and then just hang on to it.''
Magnussen says Haas is aiming to consolidate its strong qualifying with a double points finish but expects McLaren and Renault to be a threat in Sunday's race.
"Really we're looking for seventh if everything goes to normal, which is a very good position to be in if we don't need luck to be seventh. Actually seventh and eighth for the team should be our target. But it's not a given because Renault are strong and McLaren are strong so we got to keep them behind.''