Steiner working on his second F1 book

Steiner’s first book, Surviving to Drive, was written after he was approached by ghostwriter James Hogg and told the inside story of the Haas team’s 2022 season, while also dipping into episodes from earlier in Steiner’s career. It has sold some 150,000 copies and appeared in 12 languages.

Steiner and Hogg, who had previously worked on projects with Damon Hill, Johnny Herbert and Jason Plato, have already embarked on their second collaboration when the former hit the headlines earlier this month after being ousted by team owner Gene Haas, giving their work a potential new focus.

“We are working on the second book at the moment,” Steiner told Autosport. “That was planned already before. Now, obviously, the story maybe changes a little bit!”

Steiner enjoyed his involvement in the first project, which led to him undertaking signing sessions in shops with fans.

"It was a completely new experience,” he said. “I learned a lot about how some industries work, how things are done because I was never exposed to this before.

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Guenther Steiner, Team Principal, Haas F1 Team, in the pit lane before the race

“I actually enjoyed working with the writer, he is a cool dude, we had good fun. He had good fun as well. He said, hanging out with me was always good fun because it was never the pressure of ‘we need to do this.’ It all came very organically.”

Steiner denies that the time he spent on the book or on his TV appearances in the Netflix hit Drive to Survive distracted him from his duties with Haas.

"I think people are overrating that, how much distraction that is,” he said. “Because it isn't actually a lot of distraction from the daily job.

“Obviously on the race weekends, you need to work more. But for example, I didn't have 20 [sponsor] appearances a weekend, I had maybe three maximum.

“It's not like that is distracting, even writing the book. Obviously, a ghostwriter does it for you.

“Now I've got more time, but even now, we do two sessions a week of half an hour. We do one on Tuesday and one on Friday. That's all I do, he does the rest.

“You speak with him, but it's not like I spent days speaking with him. I know that some people have spent days speaking with these people, but I didn't.

“I don't think that is a big factor. I think that there were more benefits for the team than anything else about this because they got a lot of sponsors."