Why stability can help Haas recover from its 2019 nadir

Guenther Steiner wields a torque wrench rather like you would expect a lumberjack to handle an axe. In short, with total, natural ease. Big metal tools are simply second nature to a man who spent his formative motorsport years fixing battered World Rally cars and then engineering Colin McRae and Carlos Sainz Sr to WRC success.

Steiner knows cars from the ground up, and he also knows a thing or two about handling big personalities: Sainz and McRae, then Niki Lauda and Eddie Irvine, as part of Jaguar's F1 works team of the early noughties. Shrinking violets they were none. Looking for a no-nonsense, 
take-no-prisoners leader for your Formula 1 team? You could do a lot worse...

That said, last season could not have gone much worse for Haas. After three seasons of overachievement and progress, Haas avoided tumbling to the bottom of F1's pile only because of the shambles that overwhelmed Williams.
 The Haas VF-19 amassed fewer points than any of its predecessors. It was sporadically fast, but terribly inconsistent - unable to prevent the Pirelli tyres from immediately overheating into oblivion in races. Aerodynamic upgrades made no difference, such that Haas finished 2019 with the car in the specification it began in. That must have been, well, a 'wrench' for all concerned.

And the trouble didn't end there. There was the very public, and frankly embarrassing, saga with title sponsor Rich Energy and its mercurial mouthpiece William Storey, plus the team's drivers - Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen - repeatedly colliding, despite explicit instructions not to. Had Guenther been holding that torque wrench during a crunch meeting after the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, well, the nuts he would likely have used it on hardly bear thinking about... As the man himself puts it, "I know when I'm angry, I'm not a nice person."

"When you are on a downward spiral everything gets more difficult," Guenther says, reflecting on the various travails and lessons of Haas's worst season so far in F1. "Last year we didn't help ourselves with the drivers colliding when we had chances to make points.
"I think it's a consequence of once something goes bad it goes bad properly.

"The Rich Energy case had nothing to do with what our car was, but for sure it's a distraction. How big it was for me personally? At some stage I realised I could not do anything about it anyway, because I was in the hands of 'can he find more money or not?' That was more living a situation and to get the best out of it with the least bad publicity for anybody.

"It consumed some energy, but actually not a lot. The performance of the car was more consuming, and the worst thing was this up and down [from qualifying to race] - that consumes you pretty badly."

After such impressive linear progress from 2016-18, including through the major aerodynamic rule changes of 2017, it was surprising to see Haas struggle with the relatively minor tweaks enforced ahead of last season.

It's no secret that Haas does F1 in a very different way to its rivals: buying as much technology from Ferrari as possible and outsourcing most of the other work to keep the core team as lean as possible. It seemed to be working well until last year's hiccup, so was this a case of the lean, mean outsourcing machine finally coming a cropper? Steiner thinks the reality is more nuanced.

"I think there are two elements," he says. "First is obviously the resources. I think it's a little bit experience-wise as well. Except me, everybody's pretty young here! And a lot of the guys are not young in age only, but also in their jobs, in their responsibility. The experience was missing to have been in this situation before, and our reaction wasn't correct.

"That has nothing to do with the [business] model except that we are a new team. I think if we'd been more experienced we would have scratched our heads more after [the] Barcelona upgrade [didn't work] instead of believing in the good news that the car is quick. We should have reacted more thoroughly and focused on our problem in Barcelona."

The problem Steiner refers to is that "the development didn't work," he says with a bluntness his torque wrench would be proud of.

"The car in Barcelona [testing] and Australia was pretty good - and for a car which had [effectively] no upgrades to go into Q3 two races from the end cannot be a bad car - I think where we went wrong, and we know where we went wrong, and I don't want to go into the detail where it went wrong, is with the upgrades. We had a lot of upgrades, but they all didn't work.

"Not only they didn't work, you get confused. We had the first upgrade in Barcelona [round five], which was pretty big, and Romain was very unhappy with the behaviour of the car. But we got into Q3 so it's like 'you don't like it but the car is quick so let's go down that avenue'. We should have reacted earlier, but it was very strange things happening."

Steiner admits the team spent too much time focusing on its historic weakness of failing to understand and correctly manipulate the sensitive Pirelli tyres. Once Haas realised the problem was fundamentally aerodynamic rather than mechanical, it was too late to have any discernible impact on the 2019 season.

In many ways Haas endured the opposite problem to Williams, which designed a poor car behind schedule but at least made progress through the season; the Haas was fundamentally a sound design, but it didn't go anywhere.

"It's paranoia instead of looking a little bit wider and seeing what it is that doesn't make
the tyre work," Steiner adds.

"Once we got a little more clarity, half the season was over. 
In the races we never could score points, because we just couldn't keep the tyres together - we overheated them, basically, and we started to slide and once that vicious circle starts you are slower and slower.

"We started just before the summer break to look into what's actually happening, and make sure as much as possible it doesn't happen for the next year. The upgrades for after the break were already signed off.

"If you start to develop something at the summer break you're not getting it to the track until the end of the season. We had a few parts which we tested to get data, but nothing else, then we just started to do this year's car - and hopefully it will be better."

It would be easy after such a trying time to overreact at managerial level - seek a scapegoat, enact a reshuffle of personnel, hire and fire key technical and engineering staff in pursuit of better. But Steiner has instead opted for stability. There has been no bloodletting behind the scenes, Guenther preferring instead to allow his young squad to learn from its mistakes.

He's applied similar mercy to his driver line-up, giving Grosjean and Magnussen the benefit of the doubt despite their needless and costly collisions - most notably at Silverstone, where both cars ran in different specifications to gather crucial data on those aerodynamic flaws but collided on lap one...

"At first you think they don't listen; don't want to listen, then you give them the benefit of the doubt that they just did something stupid," Steiner explains.

"I understand them both because they both, even in a difficult situation like this, want to show more and try to get points for their own sake, so they run harder.

"I don't think there is a black or white answer. I think it was circumstances involved there as well - that they were always in the wrong place at the wrong time, together.

"Did they not want to listen? Maybe that as well - show 'I'm the number one here' you know? But I don't think there was intention from their side. In the back of their minds maybe it was there, but they didn't go in to the race to run each other off.

"They didn't want to be confronting me, because I know when I'm angry I'm not a nice person. They said they didn't want a scenario like Silverstone where they were sitting in front of me like schoolchildren - and I don't want that either. It doesn't make me happy if I go off the handle."

Alternative options - particularly Renault reject Nico Hülkenberg - were suggested, but Steiner ultimately resisted change. While Magnussen already had a contract, Grosjean was on shakier ground. It was his leadership in identifying the fundamental problem with Haas's Barcelona upgrade package that strengthened his case to remain.

"Changing a driver or drivers is also like giving them some blame as well, which I think isn't fair," explains Steiner.

"The performance of the car is nothing to do with them. Sometimes change is good because you start a new dynamic, but you can start something new and then get lost in that. [And I've got] more important things to do.
I cannot spend [extra] time with a new driver. I've got my hands full already."

Steiner's approach is to be hands-off with his drivers in any case, learned from working with the contrasting and demanding personalities of Messrs Sainz ("I've never met anybody like him - he's unbelievable"), McRae and Irvine.

"I never was afraid of any of these big stars," Steiner says. "I think having been exposed to these characters for sure helped me to deal with it a lot better. I don't try to be too involved in managing them [the drivers], because I'm a big believer in if you are at this level in a sport, if you need nursing from me I've got the wrong guy.

"I've got a good relationship with them, but I don't speak with them on a daily basis. A lot of people speak with their drivers twice, three times a week. I let people get on with it, and when there is something to talk [about], we talk. Characters like Carlos, Colin and Eddie helped me to get a lot more confident in dealing with these kinds of people. They were very demanding."

And so is Steiner. This season he will demand better from his team - a better car, better performance and a better reaction if things go wrong.

"The challenge is always to try to do the best and limit the mistakes you make," he adds. "You will make mistakes, and have ways out of it when you do a wrong decision. Not finding excuses for it, looking reality in the eye.

"That for maybe 2019 is one of the things we didn't do well, when we had this issue with the Barcelona upgrade we were not tough enough on ourselves - we believed in our own propaganda. 
I would not blame it on complacency, it was just a strange reaction to a strange problem - having a car that was very temperamental.

"I hope [this year] to be back fighting for points at each race. What comes out then we don't know because I don't know how strong the other ones are - but as long as you can go into a race and know after lap 20 you won't be 15th, that will be already a success.

"What I expect from the team - I'm actually very proud of how they were last year, even if we had a difficult situation. They kept their heads high, nobody gave up, they were always there, worked hard, were diligent, always tried to do their best and I think having a bad season they got a lot more confidence in themselves.

"I kept telling them: 'guys, you did it last year [2018], you haven't gone stupid overnight, we can come back'. They believe in that, and that's the most important thing for me. We just need to keep on being motivated, work hard, and we will get back to where we were."