Guenther Steiner now reckons he stayed a bit too long at Haas and he would only return to F1 if there is a right project for him.
With more than a month done, Steiner now has more clarity about his time at Haas. And now he does feel that he may have spent more time with the F1 team than he should have. He reckons when at the job you don’t realise that, once out of it, one has perspective.
Steiner has largely stayed away from F1 things but has joined RTL Germany for selected races as a pundit. The little time away has given him clarity about his situation. “Life has been good since I left Haas ahead of this season,” he wrote in his column for the official Formula 1 website.
“These last few weeks are the first time I’ve switched off from F1 for around a decade. This time has been good for me. The longer time goes on, the more I can see that I stayed at Haas too long. When you step away, you get clarity – and you can see what you need to do. While you’re there, you’re in denial, you think you can do it but you cannot.”
As of now, Steiner has no big plans of a return to F1 but he doesn’t want to return to fight for lowly Top 10 positions. If he comes back, he wants to do it right and with the right project where he can take a team to different height.
“When I was there, with what we had, you could still fight for being seventh, eighth or ninth – but you couldn’t fight for podiums without the same weapons as the other guys,” continued Steiner. “Doing that in the long-term is not what I want to do in life. I don’t want to be seventh again.
“I’ve done that. I want to be able to fight, to battle at the front. When Toto Wolff started with Mercedes, the team at the time was not at the top. Yes, they had the advantage of the engine at the beginning, but he set everything up right to be successful in the mid-term – and they won eight constructors’ championships.
“It’s the same thing with Red Bull. How long did it take for them to get there? Every year, they kept on getting better. You need that patience and long-term planning. I would come back to F1 in the future, but it needs to be the right project, done right.”
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