Haas F1 Team founder and owner Gene Haas believes Formula 1 teams' investments and overhead should be more aligned with their inherent needs, and that a more frugal approach does not preclude success.
As Haas is set to join the F1 community next year, efforts are ramping up, with the team progressively gaining momentum as it enters its final months of completion before its 2016 entry into the big time.
Since the inception of his team, Haas has favored a measured economical approach, securing the necessary budget to go racing at the highest level but one which will cater to the American team's exact needs, and no more.
“I think quite frankly a lot of teams just waste a lot of money," Haas said. "They hired way too many people, they got a little bit too much overhead … you know, we were very frugal."
"We don’t just spend money because someone says you need to spend money. Someone said ‘Well you need at least 250 people to run a team’ and it’s like, well, who said that? We’re only going to have the number of people we need, we’re only going to spend the money we need to and we’re not going to waste a lot of money."
When it was devised, Haas' business model included a technical partnership with an existing F1 manufacturer in order to simplify the team's plan of attack as well as reduce primary investments. Hence Haas Team F1's partnership with Ferrari.
"Most of the other teams developed everything themselves. They build everything from suspensions to power steering racks to hydraulic motors."
"We’re here to race cars, we’re not here to necessarily want to build them from the ground up. I mean, we have to do that, there are certain things that we have to comply with and we’re doing that but to try to do it all I think just consumes huge amounts of money."
“In the end, if we can come in and show you can run a Formula 1 team on a reasonable amount of money, that certainly should be beneficial for everybody."
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