How rejuvenated Haas recovered its F1 mojo

The last couple of years haven’t been easy for Gunther Steiner. Across 2020 and 2021, the Haas team he leads scored three points – which came from just two races out of 39. The season preceding these two barren years had provided scant returns too.

Last year felt particularly bleak. With a chassis that hadn’t been developed for almost three years and a pair of rookies as its 2021 line-up, Haas was coming to races with no hope of points.

“It’s always difficult to digest,” Steiner tells GP Racing. “I mean, you know that on Sunday night you will not go home happy. When you fly back, especially if you have to go on a long flight, it’s quite tiring. You think ‘Why the hell do I do this?’”

Going home dismayed had become routine from 2019 onwards, when an aerodynamic miscalculation meant the cars couldn’t keep their tyres within the working temperature range. It made little sense to spend money on fixing this given the impending rules overhaul, then scheduled for 2021, so Haas effectively sacrificed the following season to best prepare for the new regulations.

Then COVID intervened and delayed the new rules by a year – which for Haas meant another season of pain as the pandemic wrought further financial uncertainty, the departure of many personnel, and the inevitable restructuring. Drivers Kevin Magnussen and Romain Grosjean were ‘let go’, but not before Grosjean was involved in a shocking accident in Bahrain.

Arguably the only positive moment was when owner Gene Haas signed up to the new Concorde Agreement in 2020, preserving the team. The team boss finally had hope – that the new car would come out well and allow Haas to return to the midfield. In a sense, it was a final hope. Steiner admits that if 2022 yielded no progress, he may well have considered exploring less exasperating employment than F1.

Haas boss Steiner has had to grin and bear it during some tough seasons for his team, but the tide is turning

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

“If this year had been as bad as last, I think I would have come to that point,” he says. “Because it’s like, why do I do this? There is, I wouldn’t say an easier way to make a living, but a happier way to make a living, where you’re not exposed.”

And it wasn’t just hard on Steiner.

“I’m only one of a team,” he says. “Can you imagine the guys who have to stay at the race track and tear the cars down to get ready for the next race, knowing that it will not be any better?
I think they deserve more credit than me, because on Sunday night I go out of it.

“I mean, the only thing [why] they do it – obviously to make a living because you want to do it to make a living – but why you do this job? Because you’re interested in having a result, being successful.

"My explanation was: we finished fifth, so why can’t we do it again? You know, we didn’t get lucky" Gunther Steiner

“These people are talented enough to get another job where they need to work less and can make the same amount of money and don’t have to do 23 races a year being away from the family making all these efforts. These people have got the same passion as me: if you just do this for the money, you’re not doing it for a long time, because it’s just too hard work. And I think all of us could make a better living doing something else. And therefore the result means something to you, being successful.”

Steiner confirms that his main challenge through this time was to keep the staff motivated. To do this, he relied on reminding the team of the successes of 2018 and learning from why it went wrong after that.

“The only thing you can do [is] to explain to people that they need to believe in themselves and in the team,” he says. “Because you cannot tell them every day how great they are because then after a while they’re thinking, ‘Why am I always told the same thing?’ Sometimes less is more,
 in my opinion.

“You need to speak with them to make sure they believe we are on the right track again, and believe in themselves. Because we did it before, and that was the key for me – because if you never did that, if you never had a good result, it’s difficult to explain why all of a sudden you should be better.

Steiner concedes that it has been difficult to motivate his staff through the team's recent struggles

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

“But my explanation was: we finished fifth, so why can’t we do it again? You know, we didn’t get lucky. I think we did really a good job in ’18, and even in ’17 and ’16 we did a good job, as a new team coming in.

“We knew exactly why in ’19 we fell back. We had the car, which wasn’t good. And then in ’20 obviously if you don’t do any development, where [do] you expect to be? Logic comes in. And ’21 even worse. We didn’t do anything and had two rookie drivers. So I needed to try to explain that to people and just hope that they believe in it. Not in me, but in themselves.”

Haas has changed over those years. While before a special department at Dallara was in charge of putting the car together, now Steiner has at his disposal almost a hundred ex-Ferrari staffers, working at Maranello. With the cost cap kicking in, Ferrari found one of the buildings at its base surplus to requirements, while also having to shed staff. Haas had use for both.

The Simone Resta-headed design office,
 re-assembled at the start of 2021, went about creating the new chassis in January. Development of the 2021 car was off the menu – the new regulations were its full focus. And in Bahrain this year, the very first race of F1’s (and Haas’s) new era, the team scored more than three times the points it had managed across the previous two campaigns.

“I never count one single person for the success,” Steiner says of Resta’s role in the team’s resurgence. “Success has got a lot of fathers, you know that,
 and failure is an orphan.

“I think it’s a team effort, and Simone plays a big role in it as well, because in the end, when we started last year to put a team together, he was there and organised it. And he saw it through. He works very hard. And he has got a lot of experience. So obviously, he’s got a big role in this.”

Someone with perhaps an equally significant role in the team’s early 2022 successes is Kevin Magnussen, responsible for the fifth in Bahrain and two more points in Jeddah. As morbid as it sounds, it’s quite possible that without Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – which de facto led to Haas losing its Russian backing and shedding Nikita Mazepin – we simply wouldn’t have known how good a car the team has come up with.

“Could easily be, yes,” Steiner concedes. “I don’t know exactly how to answer, but it could easily be. But do I know it with certainty? No.”

Magnussen equalled the Haas team's best-ever qualifying result at Imola, starting the sprint from fourth on the grid

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Mick Schumacher wasn’t able to keep up with Magnussen in Bahrain, and ruled himself out of the Jeddah race with a qualifying crash. Given that last year Schumacher was comfortably clear of Mazepin, there are few reasons to believe the Russian would have been picking up points if he were still on the team. Having two rookies last year simply didn’t allow Haas to properly assess both of them, or afford either driver a proper reference to work towards.

Now, with Schumacher sharing the garage with a well-known and more experienced team-mate, Steiner is convinced he will find it easier to progress.

“Absolutely, and I said it last year. I said we don’t have a reference, we don’t really know. I brought it up at some stage, [suggesting to] put something at the test [with an experienced driver] to have a reference, to see where they are.

“Obviously that sorted itself out, with what happened with the invasion of Ukraine, and here we are. But I think for Mick it’s very important to have a reference to make the next step in improving his presence in F1.”

"[Gene Haas] was always behind the team, otherwise he would have stopped. Or sold it. There were plenty of people who wanted to buy the team"Gunther Steiner

It has not been a miracle turnaround for Haas. Its Melbourne weekend was quite poor: Magnussen failed to make Q3, exiting in Q1 instead, and neither driver scored in the race. But Steiner is convinced the team has everything it needs to stay in the midfield and avoid being left behind in the development war.

“I’m a big believer [that] it’s not the quantity of the parts you throw on the car, it’s the quality,” he says. “I’m not scared of it. I’m always aware that other people will spend more money and have more upgrades, but I think we just need to keep our heads down, stay calm and do our job good. Because I think we still have some good things coming out of this car we haven’t discovered yet.

“If you have a good base, normally a car is good through the season if you don’t mess it up. Obviously, you need to always try to keep up with the other teams, because they will improve.

“But it’s not like we have to panic now to put upgrades on, because, as I said, I find sometimes this upgrades war is overrated. It’s a good story, but performance-wise is it as good story as we try to sell it? I’ve seen that very few times that somebody brought an upgrade and the performance changed dramatically.”

Magnussen's return has given Schumacher a proper reference to benchmark himself against

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

It’s self-evident that after the split with Mazepin’s sponsors, Haas doesn’t have as much funding to match its rivals in terms of upgrade frequency. But a return to the midfield should at least rejuvenate the interest of the project’s main investor, Gene Haas.

“No, he was always interested,” disagrees Steiner. “He didn’t like the results, but I explained to him why they are where they are. And he said: ‘You didn’t tell me wrong.’ Yeah, I’m doing this a long time. You know, if you don’t develop this is where you end up.

“But then again, he believed that we could do what we did last year, even if it was a tough year. And now we are back. He was never not interested. He’s just another team member with the advantage that he owns it – or disadvantage, whatever you want to call it – and he obviously, [as] we have good results, is excited about it. But he was always behind the team, otherwise he would have stopped. Or sold it. There were plenty of people who wanted to buy the team.”

Melbourne is unlikely to be Haas’s last off-weekend this season. But there’s been enough positives so far to dispel the sense of crisis, sufficient to enable the team to approach races with a very different mindset.

“Obviously, the better you are the more enjoyable it is, and now we’re in the front end of the midfield,” says Steiner. “So it’s like, OK, what can we get out of this weekend? And then also, when you go away from the weekend you know: if it didn’t work out, next weekend we can make it up again. So it is pretty different to last year.

“I mean, [for] people to work late at night when you know you can make points on the weekend, it’s different [compared with] working at night when you know that you can just finish 18th, 19th or 20th. It’s a different way of working. People are motivated and it is a different atmosphere.

“Everybody worked hard for it last year. So I think that is where we should be now.”

Steiner believes the team's progress is deserved for its labours with uncompetitive machinery last year

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images