HAAS: A NEW BEGINNING
New drivers are only part of big changes at the American team
Sometimes you have to go backwards before you move forwards. That now is the seemingly counter-intuitive goal of the Haas team as it contemplates the implications of a miserably uncompetitive 2020, its worst season in Formula 1 to date.
Even before the season was supposed to begin, the team nursed concerns over the direction of development. Not only was it failing to make progress, it was actively going backwards as new components failed to influence car performance as expected. Once racing finally resumed in July there was no respite, just a continuation of the slide towards the back of the grid.
Its solution to that has been drastic: it stopped development completely in 2020 and has been painstakingly working its way backwards through the design timeline to establish where things started to go wrong, the aim being to understand how the divide between theory and practice opened.
In a separate but related move, the team has binned both its drivers – one of whom, Romain Grosjean, has been with Haas since day one and once saw it as a potential springboard
to joining Ferrari.
The arrival of Nikita Mazepin (see p68) and Mick Schumacher amply demonstrates the economic and political realities of modern F1 and how they trump continuity – or, indeed, loyalty.
“I wouldn’t call it shit, I’d call it… difficult,” muses team principal Guenther Steiner when invited to summarise 2020 in a single word. “A difficult season. It just started on the wrong foot with the coronavirus after Australia. Not knowing how the pandemic was going to go, when the season would restart, and then the negotiations over the Concorde Agreement. It’s difficult to piece things together when everything around is falling down…to survive the season was challenging in many respects, but I think the good thing is we came out OK. We’re still here.”
Haas was facing an existential crisis even before the pandemic took hold. It took on title sponsorship from Rich Energy in 2019, an arrangement which seemed dubious given the conduct of individuals connected with that business. Nevertheless, word had been circulating that team owner Gene Haas was looking to sell, so it was a logical move and at first Rich Energy appeared good for the money. Payments then stopped mid-season, just as Haas was going through a rough patch on track when performance upgrades failed to work.
Haas operates an unusual business model in that it buys as many components as the regulations permit from Ferrari and outsources much of the mandatory independent design and construction to Dallara. Theoretically this makes for an agile business with low overheads, but it also dictates having fewer resources to throw at problems. When the VF20 hit the track in February looking like a mild evolution of the troubled VF19, it confirmed that the financial belts had been tightened.
As early as March, before the 2020 season was originally due to start, Gene Haas spoke of the team coming to the end of a five-year evaluation cycle, and that its performance this year would be crucial to whether he would commit to another five. “If we have another bad year,” he explained, “then it would not be that favourable.”
The axe was therefore already out of its sheath when the pandemic struck and the racing season was hastily rearranged. Like many teams, Haas furloughed the majority of its staff. Unlike its rivals – and this is the most telling indicator of its financial and competitive predicament – it shelved all onward car development. Predictably, the VF20 has been a dud on track, the more so for having to run lower downforce levels to offset its Ferrari engine’s reduced grunt. But the axe hasn’t swung; political developments such as a reduced budget cap and the new Concorde Agreement, which enshrines a franchise value in the active teams, made it worthwhile continuing.
“Without the commercial settlement being more equal,” says Steiner, “and the financial regulation with the budget cap, we wouldn’t be around. I can say that openly now. It would have made no sense for us, and for some others, to be around. We couldn’t get to the budgets the big teams were spending – three or four times as much. That meant we’d never get there, performance-wise. Why hang around? OK, so you’ve got a job, but people who are ambitious don’t want to stay when you’re second or third from last.
“I’m not critiquing the big teams. They’ve put themselves in a very good position. The risk is that at some stage the whole F1 castle comes tumbling down because small teams can’t afford to take part or don’t want to spend the money to be fighting not to be last. Then the big teams say, ‘There’s no point in being here because we’re not competing against anybody’ and the whole thing comes down.
“With the lower budget cap, the playing field should become more level – if not at the beginning, in the middle term – and we’ll still be around. We’ve reorganised ourselves to stay here for the long term. There’s no point in complaining about how bad everything is and was. We need to rethink everything we do. We’re not just hanging in there, we’re making decisions to move forwards and upwards.”
These ambitions are contained within an inexact time frame. VF20 development has remained static; Gene Haas was understandably unwilling to commit to further investment until the Concorde Agreement was nailed down, by which time (mid-august) it was pointless to resume development because of the timescales involved. New parts would take weeks or months to design and build, which required great piles of money to be spent on a potential benefit for just a few races at the tail end of the 2020 season.
Given the ongoing review into where development effectiveness has gone
“THERE’S NO POINT IN COMPLAINING ABOUT HOW BAD EVERYTHING IS AND WAS. WE NEED TO RETHINK EVERYTHING WE DO” GUENTHER STEINER
awry, Haas made the strategic decision to focus its resources on mitigating the effects of the rules tweaks coming for the 2021 season. Centred around reducing the dimensions of the floor area and eliminating certain items of aerodynamic furniture, these changes add up to a blunt tool to reduce downforce levels. The impact will not be uniform across all teams and, in the case of Haas, may make a car which is already difficult to drive even more so. Not ideal given the relative inexperience of those who will be charged with driving it. The case may be that 2021 is a year of muddling through for Haas.
“Obviously we’re not performing because we stopped developments,” says Steiner. “My hope is the future is better, but it’s going to be difficult to recover next season because in F1 you can’t make performance changes quickly. It will be challenging, but the good thing is we’re here to stay.
“2022 brings new regulations so we can start to focus on that and not worry too much about performance during the 2021 season. For sure we’ll worry, but not as much as we would have done otherwise. You have to look for the good things in this crisis – in my opinion it’s only possible to go uphill from here.”
Scoring 93 points and finishing fifth in the constructors’ championship in 2018 represents the peak for Haas in F1 so far. The rot set in the following year, when the VF19 proved unpredictable and prone to great swings in performance when ambient temperatures changed. A new aero package introduced at Barcelona (race five) only exacerbated this characteristic and the team struggled to get to the root of it. One of its more baffling quirks was a tendency to overheat the surface of its tyres without bringing the rest of the carcass up to working temperature, rendering the tyres useless quickly. Among the VF20’S vices is a disconcerting sensitivity to changes in wind direction, particularly mid-corner when the car is in yaw.
This has informed the team’s ‘back to the future’ mindset: there’s no point in pushing on with developments which aren’t working. To paraphrase a truism incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein, repeating a failed course of action and expecting a different result won’t get you far in F1.
“It’s been challenging, but sometimes that’s helpful because it helps you think clearly again about what you need to do,” says Steiner. “If you have half-decent results it can be tempting to think you’re doing OK. We’ve been able to stand back and analyse everything, to make changes to go back to how we were in 2018. It might take a year or two to get there, but if we look back and see how we did it then, and where we deviated or didn’t go forwards, we’ll find out.
“This – being half-good – was part of the problem in 2019: in qualifying we were good, so we kidded ourselves we were OK when we weren’t. This year we realised we couldn’t just keep on hoping, we had to do something about it. That’s why we’ve gone back over everything, being sceptical about ourselves, not believing our own propaganda.”
While it’s common for drivers to be ejected whenever an F1 team undergoes a period of enforced introspection and renewal, the decision to drop both Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen appeared brutal. Especially so since Grosjean’s career trajectory once appeared to be heading in the direction of Maranello, while Magnussen seemed to flourish in the less corporate environment. It’s difficult to envisage a pair of rookies bringing something new to the table and, while Steiner likes to frame the change as part of a wider process of doing things differently, he concedes there are greater issues at play.
“We needed some change because we can’t just keep doing more of the same,” he says. “Doing the same thing doesn’t take you anywhere. Also, the landscape has changed. The financial impact of a driver is now more important than it was before.
“For sure, drivers aren’t happy when you let them go, and they say you did everything wrong. I can live with that. It’s just a decision – we’ve been loyal to people, but we need to make changes to keep the team going in the
“WE NEEDED SOME CHANGE BECAUSE WE CAN’T JUST KEEP DOING MORE OF THE SAME. DOING THE SAME THING DOESN’T TAKE YOU ANYWHERE” GUENTHER STEINER
right direction. I’m not blaming them for doing anything wrong – it’s just a change of direction. Priorities have changed within the team.”
It’s understood Gene Haas considers his work in F1 – publicising his machine tools empire – to be accomplished, and that he is willing to entertain offers. It’s possible that Mazepin may bring more than just a budget – after all, his father Dmitry tried to buy Force India in 2018 and continues to be outraged that Lawrence Stroll whistled it out from under his nose. A civil case brought by Mazepin via his PJSC Uralkali empire against Force India’s administrators was being weighed in the Royal Courts of Justice as this issue of GP Racing closed for press.
Schumacher’s promotion from the Formula 2 ranks, meanwhile, can be taken as a signal of closer ties with the Ferrari mothership after a couple of years in which it seemed Alfa Romeo was the preferred junior partner. Simone Resta, parachuted into Alfa by Maranello as technical director in 2018 before being recalled in mid-2019, is now being transferred to Haas to sort out its issues – or, as Ferrari’s Mattia Binotto put it rather more diplomatically, “to strengthen the American team’s technical department”. Perhaps a Racing Point/mercedes-style relationship might be in the offing?
The chances are that even though the cars will be relatively unchanged come 2021, there will be a very different look and feel to Haas. Can we look forward to a Dallas-style battle of the billionaires playing out as a minor subplot to the on-track action in the coming years? Don’t rule it out…