Why Haas is good for F1

I doubt there is a single person in the Formula 1 pitlane who believed that a new grand prix team under the current, hugely complicated, regulations could come in and be genuinely competitive from day one.

After all, no one - including the might of Toyota and its mega budgets - has achieved this for many years. The last start-up teams to come in and score regularly in the first season were Sauber in 1993 and my own Jordan team in '91. Even Stewart, which had a second place in Monaco in its first season in '97, didn't score regularly at first.

But back in the early 1990s, things were very different and certainly easier. The cars still had a gear lever, and the steering wheel was still black and round and with relatively few buttons.

Gene Haas has been around motorsport in the United States for many years. He has had his ups and downs so understands the reality that what you get out of a product is what you put into it.

His Haas CNC Racing operation came into the top flight of NASCAR in 2003 (pictured) and although it wasn't until '09 that it started to win races, its association with the leading Hendrick Motorsports team did allow it to emerge as one of the best teams once it had become Stewart-Haas Racing with Tony Stewart as part-owner and driver.

By recruiting Gunther Steiner to set up and run the F1 team, Haas brought in someone who has had an eye on F1 for many years. He had not been directly involved since his Jaguar days, but that is in some ways a good thing. After all, the old saying that people inside the forest can't see the wood from the trees does make a lot of sense.

Steiner will have seen Toyota, Honda, HRT, Caterham, Virgin and all the other new teams (and their various different identities) come and go. From the outside, he has been able to understand how and why they failed and ensured Haas did not repeat the same mistakes.

Building an F1 team and car from scratch is no easy task. The original plan, when it looked like the regulations would change to allow this, was to come in running a full-blown customer car. When this became impossible, Steiner came up with the idea of the team as it is now. While not a customer car, it does lean heavily on the experience and resources of Ferrari.

The idea of creating a partnership with Ferrari and Italian chassis constructor Dallara was one of the best moves Haas made. That creates an ideal situation, leaving the new team to focus fully on making it work in as positive a manner as possible and ensuring the racing operation itself was up to the task.

Provided individual egos are kept under control, and as long as the best was taken from Ferrari, Dallara and Haas and put into the equation, the package should always have worked. But the big question was at exactly what level.

Another key part of that equation was who was going to be in the driving seat. For any team, the driver is a vitally important part of the jigsaw. Attracting the correct calibre of driver to a new team is never easy as you normally end up with someone who is well past their sell-by date, or someone with money and often little experience. But Haas did neither.

Landing Romain Grosjean to lead the team was a real coup. He offers a perfect balance of speed, aggression and experience. What I liked about the team signing him is that it seemed to be done and dusted without any long, drawn out negotiations or indecisiveness. Like the deal with Ferrari, those at Haas understood what they needed and went out and got it done.

Esteban Gutierrez is the ideal number two. He will listen and learn from Grosjean and when he was with Sauber he sometimes showed a good turn of speed. So given the right set of circumstances, he will flourish. Unfortunately, he's not had much chance to do that so far this season with two relatively early retirements.

From the first days of testing, we saw the Haas-Ferrari was a driveable package. When you get that it inspires confidence not only in the drivers, but also in the team. As opposed to clinging on by your fingertips, you can relax a little and you suddenly find you are capable of achieving a lot more.

With Jordan in 1991, we scored our first points in the Canadian Grand Prix but it was the following race in Mexico when I really felt the team belonged in F1 and that had a very positive effect in the garage.

I remember being on the pitwall watching Williams, Ferrari and McLaren heading out of the Peraltada followed by Andrea de Cesaris in our little green car! We were not just in F1, we were competitive. I imagine those on the Haas pitwall have experienced a similar feeling.

The sixth place in Australia on debut, and the remarkable fifth in Bahrain have certainly opened a few eyes in the pitlane and leave Haas a remarkable fifth in the constructors' championship.

And it could have been a double points finish in both races had Gutierrez not been drop-kicked by Fernando Alonso in Australia and suffered from a left-front braking problem that I suspect was caused by damage to the brake duct from debris.

Everyone says Haas was lucky in Australia, but it was the team that went for the long strategy that allowed it to change tyres during the red flag and reap the rewards of doing so.

But nobody could say Bahrain was about luck. Again, Haas ran a different strategy from most others, three stints on the super-soft Pirellis and the last one on the softs was the choice. As a new team that was a bold but very good decision.

It had a couple of slowish-by-F1-standard pitstops, but that will all iron itself out with time. After all, its first genuine live pitstops were in Bahrain given tyres were changed under the red flag in Australia.

The key thing is that Haas is up there and running very competitively. Only Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull were in front and everybody involved can take real confidence from that. And deservedly so.

The other teams are now starting to compare their own performance to what might happen if customer cars are able to compete. But Haas isn't running a customer Ferrari. The mechanical package from Ferrari plays a role in the reliability of the car rather than the speed.

Such a technical alliance isn't uncommon. Force India and Manor have had relationships with larger teams on a technical level in the past, it's just that Haas has taken it to a new level, and to the maximum allowed by the regulations. That's exactly what F1 is all about.

In order to qualify as a constructor, you have to own the IP of the specific listed parts and that is exactly what Haas has done. And you can't simply claim hand-me-down technology as your own; in association with Dallara it has had to produce parts such as the monocoque, crash structures and bodywork.

Haas is responsible for that speed and the aerodynamics combined with the power unit package is what explains the difference in pace compared to some of the other teams.

As Steiner keeps saying, Haas needs to keep its expectations in check and that is correct. There will be bad days, but for now Haas has 18 points in the bag and there is a lot more to come.

But the key thing is Haas has proved a new team can come into F1 without being condemned to driving round at the back five seconds off the pace. That can only be good for grand prix racing.