JANUARY 12, 2024

Gene Haas assures team is not for sale

The unexpected departure of Gunther Steiner from Haas F1 Team caught everyone by surprise and coming immediately after it was revealed Simone Resta had also left the American team, vaccating the position of Technical Director, indicates quite a lot was going on under the surface in Gene Haas’ team.

The fact Steiner was given – or wasn’t willing to give – the opportunity to send a farewel message in the team’s official press release points to this divorce being anything but consensual and it wouldn’t be a surprise to find out, in a few weeks or months, that the Italian and his former boss are heading to court to discuss the terms of their abrupt separation.

Given the team’s philosophy of running with a comparatively small human and physical structure, outsourcing the design, development and building of its cars to Ferrari and Dallara, has failed to bring consistent results, it seems clear to everyone that either Gene Haas changes the approach, invests heavily in infrastructure and personnel and follows the same path Williams is threading now, or results won’t change much, not matter how much better new Team Principal Ayao Komatsu may be at using the current resources.

Which is why quite a few good sources believe Haas is simply getting ready to sell his team, having parted ways with the two highest paid members of his stuff. A plan the American entrepreneur denies, in a rare interview with Formula 1’s official website.

Haas made it clear that, "I didn’t get into F1 to sell, I did it because I wanted to race and Guenther had the same perspective. We’re not here to cash out, we want to race and be competitive. If you look at any team, historically, they have had a lot of good years and a lot of bad years.”

It's not a secret that Haas was made an offer by Andretti Global, who is having a lot of trouble getting its future Formula 1 entry approved by Liberty Media and the existing ten teams and wanted to resort to buying the American’s entry, but wouldn’t need the deal with Dallara to design and produce its own cars. But Gene Haas was also approached by anumber of investors, he revealed, explaining why he turned down their offers: “We have had outside investors come in, and they want to talk to us. They expect a 15% rate of return every year: 'Give me a 15% rate of return and I have a couple of hundred million dollars I’ll give you!' They have high expectations, they have all kinds of rules.

What their job is, they want to buy into you, and five years later they want to make a 100 million dollars profit. Quite frankly, I don’t need that kind of oversight, from people who come in with 200 million dollars - it’s not enough to entice me to do that.”