Gene Haas has opened up dropping Guenther Steiner and hiring Ayao Komatsu as new F1 team boss, while adding on team’s survival.
Haas dropped a bombshell this week by announcing the departure of its long-standing team principal Steiner with immediate effect ahead of 2024 season. Not going outside, Gene promoted Komatsu to the position in a different approach.
There ere no particular issues with Steiner but Gene noted about being done with the situation of no longer wanting to be 10th on the grid. The team were banking high on the new regulations, but struggled to match it as they dropped from seventh to 10th.
Both the drivers were quite open about the situation in the media. While there weren’t as much pressure from the outside, but it seems like things were brewing up on the inside and eventually the axe came on the leader of the ship – as it is always.
Gene is not faulting Steiner but notes this to be the time to do things differently. The idea behind appointing Komatsu is doing things from technical point of view. It has been a recent trend with F1 teams doing it and Haas has thrown its hat too.
Komatsu will have a support from a COO who is yet to be hired. Gene wants the midfield step to happen which does bring or attracts sponsors and also helps with the FOM money. The lack of performance and results made it clear for Steiner to be ousted.
There is no intention to sell the F1 team either as Gene reiterates. He also dropped the notion about not putting in money which is why the results are held back. Rather he feels that Haas hasn’t done good job of spending wisely in the right areas.
Here’s what he said to official F1 website –
Reason behind axe –
Haas: “It came down to performance. Here we are in our eighth year, over 160 races – we have never had a podium. The last couple of years, we’ve been 10th or ninth. I’m not sitting here saying it’s Guenther’s fault, or anything like that, but it just seems like this was an appropriate time to make a change and try a different direction, because it doesn’t seem like continuing with what we had is really going to work. It is, I like Guenther, he’s a really nice person, a really good personality. We had a tough end to the year. I don’t understand that, I really don’t. Those are good questions to ask Guenther, what went wrong. At the end of the day, it’s about performance. I have no interest in being 10th anymore.”
Taking in-house person and not outsider –
Haas: “We looked from within, at who had most experience. Ayao has been with the team since day one, he knows the ins and outs of it. My biggest concern is when we go to Bahrain, we need to show up with a car that is ready to go. Maybe having more of a managerial-type and engineering approach, we’ll see if that has benefits. I think Guenther had more of a human-type approach to everything with people and the way he interacted with people, he was very good at that. Ayao is very technical, he looks at things based on statistics – this is what we’re doing bad, where can we do better. It’s a different approach. We really do need something different because we weren’t really doing that well. Like I said, it all comes down to eight years in, dead last. Nothing more I can say on that.
“I’ve been running Haas Automation for over 40 years now. Bringing people in from the outside, it takes them time to learn, six months to a year, and a lot of time you don’t even like them. It’s better to take people you know, and even if they are not the perfect fit, at least you know what you’re going to get. That’s really worked out pretty well for us here at Haas Automation, so I’m really applying a lot of the building blocks that were here to the Formula 1 team. I really like to have people that I know, who understand the day-to-day operations, understand the people, [rather] than bringing in a stranger who is going to stir everything up and create a mess.”
No intention to sell –
Haas: “I didn’t get into F1 to sell [the team]. I did it because I wanted to race. Guenther had the same perspective. We’re not here to cash out, we want to race and be competitive. If you look at any team, historically, they have had a lot of good years and a lot of bad years. Surviving is one of the characteristics of getting better. As long as you can survive, you always have another year to prove your worthiness. This is a big change. Losing Guenther is going to cause the team to have to focus on other aspects. We will hopefully come out better for it.”
Performance, perception –
Haas: “There is a perception we spend a lot less money; we’re usually within $10m of the budget limit. I just think we don’t do a very good job of spending that money. A lot of teams have had previous investments in their infrastructure, buildings, equipment and personnel. Our model was to outsource a lot of that. We spend a lot of money. We haven’t exceeded the cap but we’re pretty darn close to it. I just don’t think we’re doing a very good job of spending it in the most effective way. That’s one of the reasons we have survived – because we are so conscious of how we spend money.
“Being efficient at what we do is going to make sure we survive in this series. We’re one of the longest surviving teams, everyone else [other new teams] have had the tendency to spend all their money in the first few years and then they go out of business. We survived for eight years, and we’re not in a situation where we are going to go out of business. But I certainly want to be able to survive for the next 10 years.”
Results will attract sponsors –
Haas: “We need to do better. It’s easier to keep sponsors and attract sponsors if we’re a mid-pack team and not a dead last team. That’s my perspective on it. At the same time, if we can run a little faster, we’ll get more FOM money, which will make life a bit easier. It’s really all about winning. We have a great team, we have great engines, we have really great drivers. There’s no reason why we are 10th. I can’t understand how we can be with all the equipment and people we have. We have had outside investors come in, and they want to talk to us. They expect a 15% rate of return every year. Give me a 15% rate of return and I have a couple of hundred million dollars I’ll give you! They have high expectations, they have all kinds of rules. What their job is, they want to buy into you, and five years later they want to make a $100m profit. Quite frankly, I don’t need that kind of oversight, from people who come in with $200m – it’s not enough to entice me to do that.”
Here’s Haas announcing Ayao Komatsu as new boss
Here’s Nico Hulkenberg on not being overly confident for 2024
Here’s Kevin Magnussen on return to F1
Here’s Kevin Magnussen on old and new specs
Here’s Nico Hulkenberg on updates needing to be better than being same
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