Steiner: I’m not interested in Gene Haas’ F1 plans

Guenther Steiner claims he is not interested in Haas‘ plans in Formula 1 after he was not given a new contract for the 2024 F1 season.

Steiner‘s seven-year reign as Haas team principal came to an end after he received a phone call from Gene Haas after Christmas that Ayao Komatsu would replace him for this year.

Haas finished last in the 2023 Constructors’ Championship after Nico Hulkenberg and Kevin Magnussen only scored points on four occasions.

“I don’t know Gene Haas‘ plans for the future,” Steiner said at Autosport International. “He didn’t share them with me, and he doesn’t have to by the way, I want to make that clear as well.

“I’m actually not really interested in it anymore. On the other side, I see where other people are going and the model we started the beginning, I think it was a very good model, but maybe it’s not time relevant anymore. But who am I to say that?”

Does Haas’ F1 model work?

Haas rely on Ferrari for all of their parts apart from the chassis and aerodynamic surfaces. They don’t go near the F1 budget cap, which is $135 million for 2024.

They finished fifth in the 2018 Constructors’ Championship with Magnussen and Romain Grosjean both finishing in the top five in Austria that year.

Steiner thinks the copy and paste model no longer works for Haas since the new ground effect regulations came into place.

“You need to invest outside of the cost cap to get your best out of the operation,” explained Steiner. “I wouldn’t say it’s fairly complex, but you need to think about how to get the operational cost cap money, how can you get most out of it to make the car go quicker.

“That is normally because you invest in something to do that and that needs to be done and I think is a lot of people picked up on that years ago and started to invest in how to be efficient by spending money in capital investment.”

Haas’ best moments in F1 under Steiner

Steiner spent two years before their 2016 debut building the team and they surprised the field by scoring points in their first race in Australia, before Grosjean finished fifth in Bahrain.

Grosjean, Magnussen, Mick Schumacher, Nikita Mazepin and Hulkenberg have all driven during Steiner’s reign, with the current drivers praising him.

Asked about his favourite moments at Haas, he said: When we went out testing in 2016 in Barcelona, the first time but you say ‘wow, it really happened. We are now on the racetrack’.

“Then obviously when you score points at our first race in Australia, that’s something because there was so many naysayers at the time that it would never work.”