Haas: Management shakeup taking effect, but team can’t fall back

Haas F1 team owner Gene Haas has stated his satisfaction with his outfit’s progress this season, praising the impact of a management overhaul and expressing hope for sustained competitiveness.

After several years of lingering at the bottom end of the field, Haas underwent significant changes last winter.

The American squad parted ways with long-time team principal Guenther Steiner and elevated to the role its director of engineering Ayao Komatsu, a move that has yielded tangible results.

Haas currently sits seventh in F1’s Constructors’ standings, the team ending the last two races in Austria and at Silverstone with a solid haul of points.

Gene Haas acknowledged his team progress but emphasized the need for continued development.

“We got to this step on the mountain and we need to stay here for a while, not go back down the mountain,” Haas told SiriusXM’s Chris Medland.

“We have good pace — our car’s not as fast as we could be or should be, but it’s as fast as we can be right now to be mid-pack. So if we can just stay there we’ll be in good shape.”

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The team owner credited the recent upgrades for the team's improved competitiveness.

“We’ll have some more upgrades coming during the year. The upgrades I think have been a lot more successful than in previous years, so hopefully that will keep us ahead of everybody else who we are racing.”

“We did a lot of changes and the changes are working, so that’s good. It’s all good,” he said. “We had four years of almost being dead last, so that was enough to motivate me.”

Reflecting on last winter’s management overhaul, Haas suggested the decision to replace Steiner and hand the team’s reins to Komatsu was somewhat self-evident.

“We did a lot of changes and the changes are working, so that’s good. It’s all good,” he said. “We had four years of almost being dead last, so that was enough to motivate me.”

Haas witnessed firsthand his outfit’s strong displays at the recent Austrian and British Grands Prix. He praised in particular the performance of Nico Hulkenberg who qualified among the top ten and scored a sixth-place finish in both events.

Unfortunately, the always reliable and handy German driver will be leaving Haas at the end of the season to join Sauber and Audi’s F1 project.

“It’s a good feeling. I think we kind of paced ourselves — right tyre selections, right pit calls and everything else,” Haas said. “It’s all important — we didn’t make any mistakes.

“He [Hulkenberg] gets every bit out of the car; we know that that’s about as fast as the car can go when he drives it. Things change, you just get used to it in racing.”

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