Haas F1 team manager Guenther Steiner says the US outfit will not write off the interim period ahead of Formula 1's regulation overhaul in 2026, but will continue to push to improve its fortunes.
Haas enjoyed a relatively strong entry into its 2023 campaign with its VF-23 – its second ground effects car – with the team scoring three top-ten finishes in the first five races of the season, including a P7 for Nico Hulkenberg in Australia.
But while the team displayed on occasion a strong pace in qualifying, its performance on race day quickly receded, undermined by the chronic tyre degradation issues that would persist for the remainder of the year.
A significant upgrade package implemented in Austin failed to pull the team out of its rut, which left it to close out the pecking order in F1's Constructors' standings.
Despite the team's stagnant performance, Steiner says it won't call into question its fundamental approach to the sport, embodied by its partnership with Ferrari and manufacturer Dallara.
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“Nobody wants to be 10th here,” Steiner told RACER. “You feel the pressure, obviously, because you want to do better. If I didn’t feel the pressure then I would be happy with that, and I’m for sure not happy with where we are.
“I think what we need is to work hard and find the performance on the car so that we can get better… we know we can do it because we have done it before.
“We did this analysis of what we need to do. I think at the moment where we are is actually a help to move forward again, because you can rely on what we have got and what we have done before.
©Haas
“If we now try to do everything ourselves, normally when you would do such a big step you have to make a step backward to do two forward, so the risk would be even bigger to be worse off than we are now for the short term.
“Obviously the mid and long term is a different story, but at the moment we need to get out of the hole in the short term in my opinion to show what we can do, and then we can think, ‘Could we allow ourselves to make a step backwards?’ But if you make a step backwards now, where do we end up?
“So at the moment we need to be patient and conscious and work with this business concept we are using now, with this model, and just try to get back to where we were a few years ago.”
As teams contemplate the sport’s upcoming regulation reset that will occur in 2026, a struggling outfit could be tempted to write off its 2024 and 2025 seasons and focus all its attention on the future.
However, Steiner sees too many drawbacks associated with such an approach that Haas has exploited in the past, with mixed results.
“You never want to do that — you cannot allow yourself to even think about that,” Steiner explained.
“It’s not like I can go out there and say, ‘Yeah, we’ve decided for two years we will definitely finish 10th.’ We have done that before when we were struggling in the COVID years; we cannot do that and we do not want to do that because we have also a responsibility to all the people who work here who put a lot of effort in to move forward.
“We just need to push that we do what we did before. We always were the smallest team and finished very well. It’s not like it’s just now; the last three or four years there was no bad team in Formula 1 — they were all very good.
“Everything is getting closer and closer together. I go back to the Brazilian qualifying — from P1 to P20 in Q1 there was around 0.8s. 0.8s is nothing.
“So it’s just like that little bit and that little more can move you quite a bit.”
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