The first American entry since 1986, Haas is clearly chomping at the bit.

Today it released details of its test schedule, with Romain Grosjean and Esteban Gutierrez alternating at the opening test at Barcelona, while the second test sees the Mexican in action for the first two days before handing over to his French teammate.

"In our first test of the season and first as a team, you try to make sure everything works as you designed it," admits team principal Guenther Steiner. "You just prove out whatever you did, and in the second part of the test, you try to get performance out of the car. Or, better said, you try to get performance as quickly as possible. First of all, make sure everything works. Everything is new on the car. The first test is quite important just from a reliability factor. You try to learn as much as possible about the car. You get the baseline on the car and you work off that baseline the rest of the year.

"Because we are a new team, you want to make sure all the people work together," he continued, "the mechanics work together with the race engineers - to make the car reliable, to understand the car. Everything is new for us. It's not only a new car, but a new team. In the second test, hopefully we put ourselves in a position to start work on the setups of the car to where we can learn how to make it better for the race.

"At the test, there is no limit to how much we can work. We have a day and night shift. In the old days, which weren't so long ago, it was the same people doing the day and night shifts. What is done now is you have people coming in around 6 p.m. and have dinner with the guys from the day shift, so they exchange what they learned and know what they have to do. The (night shift) guys take over and work until the sun comes up, then the day shift comes in again and you do the same thing. They have breakfast together and some go to sleep and the others go to work.

"What you do normally, because at the test you run only one car and have two mechanic crews, you swap them over on the second test," he revealed. "You still have to be careful because you will have some who don't want to go home. They want to stay, so you have to tell them 'No, your time is over.'

"It is quite a challenge. We try to give them a Saturday or Sunday off before they go to Australia. These guys, when they come back to the workshop after the second test, have to rebuild the cars before they are shipped to Australia. You have to be careful so they aren't burned out."

Asked, what the team will take from the tests and apply to the season opener, he said: "You prove out your methodology, how you work, how your guys work. You have the time in between - 10 days to fix it. There is so much electronics in these cars, software programs. You try to prove out everything so there are no mistakes. When you get to Australia and your drivers notice the car's behaviour isn't right, you will know what to do to get the behaviour of the car right. It's a mix of everything. The biggest thing is to run as much as possible at Barcelona and avoid any downtime with the car breaking or something. The more you drive, the more you learn and the better prepared you are for Australia."

"The first thing for the test is to get the car to run and to work well from there," added Romain Grosjean. "Hopefully, we can get a lot of mileage. This is a new team, so we need to get everyone to work together, all the engineers, mechanics and the drivers. We need to get as much data and knowledge as we can. It's important to get the reliability sorted as early as possible because we don't get much testing and we're going straight to Melbourne."

Asked if he follows his own protocol during the test, or whether it is dictated by the team, Grosjean said: "It's a little bit of both. As a driver, you want to be comfortable in your seat. You want the steering wheel to work as you want, along with the dashboard. You want the communication with your engineers to work. From the team side, of course, there is a protocol they want to follow. They want to do as much mileage as they can. It's a big test, which we don't get during the course of the season. They also want to make sure everyone works together. On the final day, you normally do a race simulation where you do a pit stop and you work on strategy. You want to see that you don't have any problems so you're ready to go to Melbourne."

"I felt a very warm welcome from day one with Gene and Guenther and from everyone I've met in the team," he concluded. "It's a nice spirit. It's an American spirit. Everyone wants to go racing. It's very exciting, as it's a new challenge. It's going to be something unique having an American Formula One team on the grid for the first time in 30 years. Driving the car out of the garage on day one will be unbelievable. There's a lot to look forward to. I already feel comfortable in the team. Everyone is motivated and wants to get to the first test, and then the first race."

"We expect to run the car as many laps as possible," added Esteban Gutierrez. This will be our priority, as we need to be sure to sort all the possible issues we may have in order to fix them on time.

"It will be very interesting to develop our car setup through the tests in preparation ahead of the first race. I am sure we will have plenty of work to do. At the same time, the most important thing will be to always stay together as a team in order to be very efficient with our progress.

"I feel very excited after a complete season as a reserve driver," he admitted. "I am full of energy, full of ideas and very hungry to race. The development of our car from the beginning will be crucial in order to start the season confident that we have done our job as a team to prepare in the best way possible."

Asked how his year as third driver at Ferrari prepared him for his return to the grid, he replied: "I focused a lot on my preparation. Basically, anything that will bring me as close as if I were driving. I did a lot of karting, also tested quite a few days in Fiorano with old F1 cars and a lot of days in the simulator in Maranello. Ahead of every race I even tried my best to put my mindset as if I was going to race, and I used my imagination to keep my mind sharp. I used all the time that I had to observe the whole team, mainly the drivers in order to learn the best things from them."