Steiner: New teams 'pose risk to long-term stability of F1'

Haas F1 team principal Guenther Steiner fears that adding new teams to the Formula 1 grid would risk the long-term stability and financial success of the sport.

There are currently ten teams on the grid, with Haas the most recent to join in 2016. Other contemporary additions to the line-up including Marussia/Manor, Caterham and HRT proved short-lived.

The FIA recently opened up a formal application process for new teams seeking to enter Formula 1, with Andretti Global run by Michael Andretti foremost among them.

While FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem has been enthusiastic about the prospect of adding more teams to the grid, his counterpart in Formula 1 - CEO Stefano Domenicali - has been markedly cooler.

And many team bosses including Mercedes' Toto Wolff and Red Bull's Christian Horner have actively opposed enlarging the line-up, citing issues ranging from the share of prize money to the lack of space in the pits for more garages.

Now it's Steiner who has revealed his stance on the idea of adding more teams, saying that a precipitous expansion could threaten the very survival of the sport just as it's enjoying an unprecedented surge in global popularity.

• Read also: F1 and FIA still deadlocked over adding new team

“You have ten very stable teams which are all technically stable, financially stable,” Steiner explained to the media recently, in the paddock at Spa-Francorchamps during the Belgian Grand Prix.

"We made big growths in the last year. It is very stable. We have ten very good teams and if you change something, you could go the other way.

“If you put another team in and maybe somebody gets in jeopardy in three or four years time, maybe only eight or nine teams will be left,” he cautioned.

“If you do too much and the teams aren’t stable anymore, what would you achieve then?" he continued. “You’ll be sitting here in three years saying you’ve lost a team because it went bankrupt.

“At the moment we are at the peak. Formula 1 is growing and there is never an end to it. We could have 56 races in a year and 22 teams in a year, and would be happy."

But Steiner pointed to the history of the sport over the last 72 years as an argument why such expansion would not be a good idea.

"F1 is a pretty old sport and there were never ten good teams," he asserted. “If you look back in history, I think we are in a very good moment. It was never as good as now, we never had ten stable teams.

“The business is run by FOM and they need to make sure that this is sustainable," Steiner noted. “There was a business plan from FOM to get us to this place.

"This didn’t happen by accident. There were deeds done, agreements and a lot of work was done," he added. "Their plan, they don’t want to risk it, what they are doing, by admitting more [teams] for no good reason."

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