Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsHaas F1 Team

Haas speaks of respect for rivals

Gene Haas says it is important his team respects the achievements of its rivals as it looks to establish itself in F1.

Haas made a dream start to its first F1 season by scoring two top six finishes in the opening two races courtesy of Romain Grosjean. China was a much more difficult weekend, however, and the team failed to score as it struggled with car set-up and a number of reliability issues. Team owner Haas says it is easy for observers to underestimate the achievements of any team which has a good weekend, especially his own when it is up against such experienced opposition.

“Well it seemed like the first few days we were quite lucky, things went very, very smooth,” Haas told F1i. “Especially like in Barcelona for the testing. Then all of a sudden the next week nothing went right. We were in Melbourne and we had a good finish with Grosjean and then in Bahrain he got the same thing so it made it look like this is easy to do.

“Well it just goes to show you that this is not easy to do and you have to have some respect for the other teams to do what they do, because you can’t just come in here - these guys have been doing this for years - and expect to be better than them.”

And Haas says the difficulties his team faced during the race weekend in China shows why it had been urging the need to keep its expectations in check early in the season.

“I think it was all good. I think it’s all good because it brings everything into perspective. In order to do well in this you have to be well prepared, you have to be well rehearsed, it just takes a lot of preparation. You might have some lucky days but in general there’s not a lot of luck in racing.”

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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.