An otherwise quiet off-season for
Formula 1 was shaken up by the unexpected departure of Haas team principal Guenther Steiner, hitherto the third-longest-serving boss in the sport behind Red Bull’s Christian Horner and Mercedes-AMG’s Toto Wolff.
Despite the revolving-door policy adopted up and down the paddock recently, the news came as a shock, because Steiner wasn’t just a hired executive – he was the heart and soul of his team.
The former Jaguar and Red Bull man was in the US and running a growing composite business when he started the team from a blank sheet of paper. He came up with the concept of having a small full-time staff while sourcing as much as possible from suppliers Ferrari and Dallara, and convinced machine tools magnate Gene Haas to fund the project.
The team got off to a sensational start in 2016, when Romain Grosjean came sixth in its debut race, and two years later it finished a remarkable fifth in the constructors’ championship. After that, though, life became tougher as other teams stepped up their games, and then, in 2020, the challenges of the pandemic hit Haas particularly hard. In 2023, the team slipped to 10th and last in the table, despite its car showing good one-lap pace.
Just as Steiner’s latest three-year contract was expiring at the end of December, he was told by Gene Haas that he wouldn’t be retained.