Hectic life for Haas on the complex F1 road
Ventures down the grid to see the American team getting ready for the new season
To the untrained eye, the endless movement of the Formula One juggernaut is a minor miracle, a seamless feat of teleportation. One week you are in Montreal, the next in deepest Azerbaijan, and yet an entire paddock of pantechnicons is assembled and dismantled without missing a beat. You are, in a peculiar way, everywhere and nowhere.
Tomorrow, the flag will fall on another 20-race season, and Melbourne’s Albert Park will look a picture in the full glory of an Australian sunset. But it is only by venturing further down the grid, past the big guns to a smaller team such as Haas, that you find that just to be here represents one of the greatest and most complex feats in sport.
Haas, manifestly, have a point to prove. It has been 30 years since F1 last had an American team in its midst, and the portents are not encouraging. US F1, the sport’s previous star-spangled experiment, did not even make it to the start line after the team were granted entry in 2010. Guenther Steiner, the wired, workaholic Italian whom owner Gene Haas has appointed as team principal, admits there was a credibility deficit to overcome when they made their debut here 12 months ago. “We all said we wanted to gain respect in our first season,” he says. “I don’t think people question us any longer, after what we did.”
Three top-10 finishes in the first four races for Romain Grosjean, the talented Frenchman who carved a name for himself at Lotus, established Haas’s reputation. But the task of creating a deeper presence in the near-saturated market of US motorsport is more fiendish still. Haas, as one source said, face an unenviable struggle in competing with the “800-pound gorilla” that is Nascar, which dominates coverage on 36 weekends of the year. Even when there is F1 taking place, races in the Middle East and Far East pass off while most of America is asleep.
The structure of the Haas operation is also highly intricate, with a head office in North Carolina, a European ‘forward base’ in Oxfordshire and a factory in Italy. “We have a harder job than other teams,” says Dave O’Neill, the team manager, who spends 31 weeks each year away from home. “It’s quite difficult for somebody who hasn’t been in F1 before. We have one guy in, I won’t say in which department. He has been in motor racing 20 years, a well thought-of person. But as soon as you put him in F1 he is a fish out of water. The pace is so quick.”
O’Neill barely has a moment’s rest. That much becomes clear on a rare behind-the-scenes look inside their garage during winter testing, where the 2017 car has, as usual, had to be created from scratch. The work runs to a 24-hour pattern. By the time the day team finish at 6.30pm after analysing hundreds of laps worth of data, the night crew take over with an exhaustive laundry list of duties.
“Everything on the car has a temperature, a pressure, a measurement of some kind,” O’Neill explains. “The more you can measure pico tubes, aerodynamics for the floor, the more you can understand. Make sure there is no abnormal wear. Just to fire up the car takes nearly an hour. You have five or six heaters and you have delicate procedures to bring them up to a certain temperature. Everything’s a giant jigsaw. If you received one for Christmas, it might take you a couple of days to finish. But once you have done it 10 or 20 times, you start to know where everything goes.”
On race weekends such as this in Melbourne, the 24/7 commitment is curtailed by curfews. But for Haas, the process of mobilising for the first long-haul ‘fly-away’ of the season begins up to six months earlier. Pete Crolla, the head of logistics, presents a dizzying spreadsheet of how all the component elements, from engine parts to the cups and saucers for corporate hospitality, come together 10,500 miles from the team base. “For Australia, we send 32 tonnes by air and eight by sea,” he says. “The earlier you plan, the more relaxed you can be about everything. As soon as we came away from Abu Dhabi last November, we had a basic schedule formed from rumours and suspicions. You wouldn’t wait until the official FIA calendar was finalised, because you would be too far behind.”
O’Neill documents the painstaking routines of configuring the garage in Australia to the team’s needs. On Monday, the equipment that had arrived over land and sea had to pass forklift tests to satisfy local health and safety requirements. Tuesday was devoted to tidying up the garage, even if Haas found it uncomfortably narrow to store the gigantic rear tyres. On Wednesday, the cars came in, in the form of a chassis and two front corners. Radiators were put in, the suspension built up. Come Thursday morning, it was time for scrutineering, to satisfy FIA regulations.
The remaining time passes essentially in a blur. Friday morning is a time for adjusting to the particular demands of the Albert Park track, where falling leaves from the surrounding trees can create a green, awkward surface. Saturdays are focused upon the pursuit of the one perfect qualifying lap, and on Sunday morning, all that is left to do is to polish, to check brake systems and iron out the rhythms of the pit-stop. “Then, we strip the car back down to the chassis,” O’Neill says. “We have to be finished by midnight, because the slots have been booked for the air freight to China. Everything has to get on 60 lorries for the flight from Melbourne to Shanghai, in time for the next race.”
It is an exhausting, often confounding rigmarole, but as Haas continue to assert their right to be taken seriously in F1, the key personnel are united by a profound dedication to their craft. As Crolla puts it: “Ultimately, this is a life we have all chosen. It’s far more than a career. It has to be your passion, too.”