Former Haas F1 Team principal Guenther Steiner insists that he has no bad feelings towards the squad despite the way he was dropped from his role at the start of 2024 and replaced by Ayao Komatsu.
Steiner had been in charge of the team since its inception and maiden season in 2016, reporting to team owner Gene Haas. However a drop-off in performance led Haas to make an abrupt change at the top before this season.
Steiner doesn't blame Haas for that decision, and indeed feels that he stayed too long and should have moved on earlier than he did in search of new challenges, which have included media work and writing two F1 books.
“I have no bad feelings against the team,” he told the Sky Sports F1 podcast this week. "I should have left in the middle of 2022. It started afterwards to get difficult.
“You understand when you are gone," he acknowledged. "When you are in it, you have tunnel vision: 'I need to do this'. You never think about why the hell am I doing this, it doesn’t make sense."
Steiner said that it was during the pandemic that things changed for him and F1 began to feel like hard work. “When you set up an F1 team you want to establish it, then get points, then go the podium. You need a goal.
“When COVID hit, everything stalled. Every day was the same. We were just doing a job.
"It started afterwards to get difficult," he explained. “I couldn’t see how we could make progress. We were going to races and were so happy to [get just] one point, but how long can you do that?
"You can do it a long time, but not me," he stated. “I need to have something bigger to aim at than getting one point. Because I’ve done that, I’ve got the T-shirt."
Haas reached a peak of fifth place in the 2018 constructors championship but was then in the bottom two for three seasons in succession. The team finished pointless in 2021 with a rookie line up of Nikita Mazepin and Mick Schumacher.
The war in Ukraine forced Steiner to drop Mazepin and break the team's ties with Russian oil business Uralkali but it did see them back to eighth in the standings by the end of 2022.
Unfortunately they were at the bottom again in 2023, which was the final straw for Haas who decided to put long time director of engineering Komatsu in charge with Steiner heading out of the door.
The change has proved to be good for the team which is currently in seventh place with three races remaining in 2024, thanks to this year's line-up of Nico Hulkenberg and Kevin Magnussen.
Next year will see a new look for the team, with Esteban Ocon arriving from Alpine to join current reserve Oliver Bearman who has already taken part in two races this year for Haas and a third for Ferrari.
"Ollie was the obvious choice to stand-in for [Kevin]," Steiner said. "It’s good for him to get in the car ahead of his full-time debut with the team next year. He did a great job for Ferrari in Saudi Arabia."
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