Haas 'really depressed' by gap to top teams

Haas is seventh in the constructors' standings on 29 points halfway through its second season in F1, with a best finish of sixth in July's Austrian Grand Prix from Romain Grosjean.

Grosjean finished comfortably clear of the American outfit's midfield rivals in that race, But was more than a minute behind Valtteri Bottas' winning Mercedes at the end of the race and was 1.2 seconds slower than the Finn in qualifying.

Haas said he was baffled how Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull could be "light years" ahead of the rest of the pack.

"I think we have two good drivers right now, they've both scored points, the car's very good," Haas, whose team has a close technical partnership with Ferrari, told Autosport.

"But the real cloud that hangs over us is the fact we're one to two seconds [a lap] off the fastest cars.

"Quite frankly we don't understand [how] we can be that far off with what we consider to be state-of-the-art equipment.

"Other than the top three teams, everybody's in that boat.

"That to me is probably the biggest problem right now, that the top three teams are light years ahead of everybody else.

"They are also the teams that develop their own engines, transmissions and chassis, so there's an inherent advantage in doing that.

"How do we overcome that? Quite frankly there's no answer to that, which is really depressing."

Haas said the wide gap separating F1's top three squads - which between them have locked out the podium at every race this year so far except for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix - from the rest needed addressing.

"That's a dilemma that F1 is facing," Haas added.

"You have the teams at the front and then this big mid-pack... we're all very close together; the mid-pack is all within a second.

"So from a competitive standpoint we're all very equal, it's just you have this group way out in front that we're all struggling with.

"The reality of it is that outside those three teams nobody has a chance to win. "If you're running sixth through to 20th, you really don't have a chance of winning."