Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsHaas F1 Team

Haas chassis 'a better design' than Ferrari

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Gene Haas says his new F1 team believes it has a chassis which is "a better design" than next year's Ferrari.

Haas enters Formula One next season and has closely aligned itself with Ferrari in terms of being supplied with a number of parts from Maranello. However, team owner Gene Haas believes the direction the American team has taken in terms of its chassis is a big departure from what Ferrari has been doing.

"A substantial amount of the engine, transmission, suspension will come from Ferrari," Haas told Sky Sports. "But there's still a lot left that we have to do.

"We're doing our own CFD computer analysis on our own, we're also working with Dallara on a lot of the analysis of the body structure, but we're building those parts ourselves. And I don't know why we can't be as good as anybody else at that. We have some very bright people working at Kannapolis on the analysis of the chassis.

"I think our chassis is going to be substantially different in construction from the Ferrari one, because we're just doing it separately. We think our chassis in some ways will be better than a Ferrari chassis because we're using some more…I won't say state of the art but we're taking a different approach than Ferrari is and we think it's probably a better design.

"The Ferrari is more conventional, they're going to stay with what they've been doing for a number of years. I think there could be some big differences there."

And Haas says there is nothing stopping his team from beating Ferrari on track even if it will be using a number of Ferrari parts.

"Being a Ferrari 'B' team, I don't think there's any negativity in that at all because that's obviously a sign of excellence, that we're going to have some of the best equipment out there to compete with these teams. I don't think we could beat them at that. Can we beat them at racing? I don't know.

"I have to be honest with you, I don't think Ferrari has held anything back; they've opened the doors and said 'Here's what we do, here's how we do it. I guess if you can take our nuts and bolts and beat us then maybe we can learn something too'."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.