MPH: Were Haas failings due to Steiner or a lack of cash? We'll see...
F1
Guenther Steiner left Haas after a last-place finish in the 2023 F1 championship with little sign of progress. But the team boss may not have been to blame, says Mark Hughes, with his departure more significant than just a personnel change
Steiner parted ways with Haas, and says wouldn't set a team up in the same way again
Interesting times at Haas F1 as the man behind the whole programme, Guenther Steiner, has parted company with the team, unable to agree with owner Gene Haas about the way forward.
It’s all been brought to a head by the team’s very difficult 2023 season in which the car, whist occasionally pretty good in qualifying, was invariably hopelessly bad at looking after its tyres in the races. The fundamental nature of the problem was never properly understood – and even the introduction of key features of the ’24 car in a late-season update brought nothing. In fact Nico Hülkenberg was adamant the old car was better.
Both the tyre problem and the lack of progress were very familiar themes from previous Haas seasons. Steiner was adamant the problem lay in the quality of the team’s simulation tools. The problem wasn’t running budget: they were actually at the budget cap. The problem wasn’t that they couldn’t afford to develop the car; it was simply that the developments weren’t adding performance.
“That’s the story of our season,” said Hülkenberg after the season’s final race, where in the old-spec car he comfortably beat Kevin Magnussen’s new-spec machine. “We didn’t develop anything and totally got overtaken and out-developed and hence we’re last today. That’s the root cause. We need to really address that coming into next year. We have to prove it, when the time comes. We need to look at what we’ve done and what we have. Maybe we need to make some changes, because what we’ve done this year didn’t work, but that’s some big questions going into winter break now.”
Drive to Survive showed Steiner visiting former Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto’s vineyard. Both are now out of the picture. Are the days of the Haas/Ferrari partnership also numbered?
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Steiner, in the bluff no-nonsense way he has, was pushing very hard to encourage Gene Haas to invest further in the team, to prevent it being left behind. Gene feels he has invested enough in the team already. Technical director Simone Resta was similarly frustrated by the tools at his disposal. He too has left the team.
The team is of course structured in a unique way, its design and technology base integrated within Ferrari’s Maranello walls and the team taking almost all of its mechanical hardware from Ferrari. The aero team is then left to create its own concept around that, using Ferrari’s wind tunnel. Dallara is still involved in aspects of the design and the race team operates out of Banbury in the UK. It’s proven a very cost-effective way of being in F1, but there are now questions of whether its time has passed. The technology of how to extrapolate from tunnel data has moved on and requires capital investment and a tighter integration between departments.
The question is whether this was a team operating as well as it could given the tools at its disposal. Or whether the tools were perfectly adequate and not being managed effectively. New team principal Ayao Komatsu (former trackside engineering chief) now gets to make the case that it was the latter. Let’s see…
Guenther Steiner was the heart — and public face — of the Haas F1 team, so replacing him is much more than just a change of leadership, writes Damien Smith. Does it indicate that a much larger decision is coming?
By
Damien Smith
In opting to let Steiner go rather than buy into his vision of investing further, Gene Haas is giving the impression of an owner who would be prepared to sell. The valuation of F1 teams has sky-rocketed since he established the team in 2016 – and in Michael Andretti’s outfit we currently have an 11th team unable to reach a commercial agreement with F1 about joining the grid because of the implications it has on the dilution of income for the other teams. Logically, might Haas not sell to Andretti to make everyone happy? Andretti would get the commercial agreement, a say in the 2026 Concorde Agreement it would otherwise have no part in and no requirement to front up whatever the anti-dilution fund (currently $200million) was deemed to be.
But it’s not quite so straightforward. For one thing Gene Haas is insisting he doesn’t want to sell (which may of course be a negotiating tactic on price). For another, the price at which he might be persuaded to sell may not make economic sense to Andretti, especially as he would essentially just be buying an entry (and a Ferrari PU deal for a couple of years) rather than the infrastructure of a more conventional F1 team. He may prefer to press ahead with challenging the legality of being prevented from taking part even though the FIA has accepted his eligibility.
There’s a significance to the Steiner-Haas split beyond just that of a change of team principal. It’s just not clear yet how it will play out.
