F1 team owner Gene Haas has revealed his reasons for his shock decision not to renew Gunther Steiner's contract as principal.
Steiner has been in charge of the Haas F1 project from the very start, even before the squad lined up on the grid for the first time in the 2016 Australian Grand Prix.
The team had its best ever season in 2018 when it finished in fifth place in the final constructors standings ahead of the likes of McLaren, Force India, Toro Rosso, Sauber and Williams.
But things have gone downhill from there, with a particularly poor performance in 2021 when the team finished in last place without a single point after opting to save money on car development and by fielding two rookie drivers.
Last year saw Haas finish on the bottom for a second time. For the team owner this was the final straw in showing that the squad wasn't going in the right direction, and wasn't improving quickly enough or meeting its objectives.
“It came down to performance," Haas told Formula1.com's Lawrence Barretto in an exclusive video call this week. "It doesn’t seem like continuing with what we had is really going to work.
“Here we are in our eighth year, over 160 races," he explained. "We have never had a podium. The last couple of years, we’ve been tenth or ninth [in the final standings at the end of the season].
"At the end of the day it’s about performance. I have no interest in being tenth anymore," he emphasised. "We really do need something different because we weren’t really doing that well. Like I said, it all comes down to eight years in, dead last. Nothing more I can say on that.
“We had a tough end to the year. I don’t understand that, I really don’t. Those are good questions to ask Guenther, what went wrong," Haas said. “I’m not sitting here saying it’s Guenther’s fault, or anything like that, but it just seems like this was an appropriate time to make a change."
Despite bringing Nico Hulkenberg in to replace Mick Schumacher as Kevin Magnussen's team mate at the start of the year, the VF-23's tendency to be super hard on its tyres proved a critical failing.
A late-season upgrade introduced in Austin designed to improve the situation failed to the point that Hulkenberg opted to return to the older specification parts for the remaining races.
Even so, Steiner will certainly be much missed in the F1 paddock. His unguarded and frank manner had made him a star of Netflix's hit behind-the-scenes documentary Drive to Survive.
©Haas
"I like Guenther, he’s a really nice person, a really good personality,” Haas said after drawing a line under a ten year working partnership between them. "Guenther had more of a human-type approach to everything with people and the way he interacted with people. He was very good at that."
Steiner has been replaced with immediate effect by Ayao Komatsu, the US outfit’s director of engineering. Technical director Simona Resta - who had been on loan from Ferrari since 2021 - has also left.
Haas said that "in appointing Ayao Komatsu as Team Principal, we fundamentally have engineering at the heart of our management."
It's not known what changes Komatsu intends to bring into the team, or how much he will be able to turn things around for 2024 with just a little over a month before pre-season testing gets underway in Bahrain.
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