Gene Haas: 'We're way ahead of where we planned'

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Haas team owner Gene Haas says his outfit is "way ahead of where we planned on being" in its first season in F1.

The American team burst onto the scene with consecutive top six finishes in the opening two races of the season, before also scoring points in Russia. While there has only been one point-scoring finish since the fourth race - with Romain Grosjean finishing seventh in Austria - Haas says the team is still more developed than he was expecting.

“You know I think we’re really kind of way ahead of where we planned on being in terms of the maturity of the team,” Haas told F1i. “For example, the team did really well [in Hungary] in qualifying. They had a lot of changes between wets and intermediates and dry tyres and I think they proved they could get things done quickly and efficiently and that was all positive.”

And Haas says he is impressed with how quickly his team is able to react to challenging situations at each race weekend despite only coming together over the past 12 months.

“The biggest thing we need to accomplish is just the team being able to come to the races, know what they're doing and to respond to the challenges of just racing every weekend. That in itself I think is a tremendous accomplishment to say after only just over ten races these guys can come to a race and respond on an almost instantaneous basis to what needs to get done.

“They’ve done very well. I would assume that would have taken twice as long as it has and for most teams it takes two or three years even to get where we are and what we’ve done in less than six months.”

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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.