Guenther Steiner has questioned the very reason Gene Haas remains in Formula 1 given his team’s enduring stagnation, suggesting his former boss may have simply lost interest in trying to turn the American outfit into a genuine contender.
Steiner, who became one of F1’s most recognisable figures during his colourful tenure as Haas team principal, departed the team at the start of 2024 after years of increasingly obvious friction over its direction.
Almost three years later, his frustration has hardly faded.
Haas entered F1 in 2016 with the promise of disrupting the established order, but the team has never converted its early flashes of promise into sustained progress. Its fifth-place finish in 2018 remains its best championship result, while a podium continues to elude the organisation.
For Steiner, that lack of ambition raises a fundamental question: what exactly does Haas want from F1?
‘Maybe he lost interest’
Steiner was blunt when asked about Gene Haas’ objectives for the team during an appearance on the High Performance Podcast.
“With Gene Haas, you’d need to have him here on your podcast to ask him what he wanted to do [with the team] because I still haven’t understood,” Steiner said.
For the former team boss, simply participating in F1 was never enough. He wanted Haas to aim beyond surviving in the midfield and eventually put itself in contention for the sport’s biggest prizes.
“Being in a sport, for me being somewhere competitive, I want to be a winner,” he added.
“That is what I aim for.. Only one can achieve it, I’m fully aware of that, you know, but you make the maximum effort, not just [aim] to be a participant. It’s the same in life – you don’t just want to be a participant, you want to be a part of life, you want to enjoy yourself.
“In the beginning there was a clear plan – it’s difficult to get into F1, as we now can see with Cadillac it’s not easy.
“We had success pretty early, we then had a few bad years as well, you know, 2019, but that’s normal in a sport, you cannot have always good years.
“You are competing with the best of the best and at some stage, I don’t know, maybe he lost interest in the sport, maybe he thought it should be done different, and the relationship just deteriorated I would say, over time.”
‘I want a podium’
Steiner now believes he should have walked away sooner, admitting that he remained at Haas for longer than he should have as it became increasingly clear that his vision for the team’s future was not being embraced.
“I think I stayed two years too long,” Steiner said. “What I should have done differently is to sell the ownership my vision differently. That’s what I should have done.”
By late 2022 and into 2023, Steiner says the warning signs had become impossible to ignore. He could see what it would take to escape the midfield but felt unable to convince the organisation to make the necessary commitment.
“End of ’22, ’23, because I could see where the other teams are going. I could see, to be successful, what needs to be done, and I couldn’t get that across,” the Italian explained.
“Again, it’s my fault not getting it across maybe, but I tried to say, ‘This is what we need to do to be successful in the future.’
“When you’re not working in F1, people sometimes don’t understand when you are doing something [for] seven, eight years to get a point in F1. I’ve done that, I want a podium.
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“If I don’t have the opportunity to go for something better… I mean, I don’t want to fight every year for the same thing like the team is doing at the moment.
“They fight for the same thing, to get a point. Yeah, I’ve tried to get points for 10 years to finish seventh, eighth, sixth, ninth, 10th. It’s like you need to put yourself in a place to say, ‘I want to reach the podium.’
“If you’re ambitious in life, that is what you want to do. Will I ever reach the podium with what I’ve got? No. And if you don’t believe anymore in it and you’re not happy just to get a point on the weekend, then you need to change. And that’s why I said for me it was good to change.”
Steiner’s parting assessment is therefore brutally simple: F1 should be about chasing something bigger, not endlessly celebrating survival.
And after a decade without a podium, his question over whether Gene Haas still shares that hunger could prove more uncomfortable than any criticism of the team’s on-track performance.
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