Haas Formula 1 boss Guenther Steiner has denied the team could repeat what it has done previously and sacrifice the next two seasons to prepare for the 2026 regulations.
The American outfit endured a tumultuous 2023 campaign that saw it return to the foot of the Constructors’ Championship for the second time in only the last three seasons.
Despite opening the season promisingly with a total of eight points from the first five rounds, Haas soon hit a development ceiling and amassed four points in the last 17 rounds.
While it introduced a heavily revised car in the closing stages of the year, Haas was unable to solve the ongoing tyre degradation problems that hindered its competitiveness.
Steiner has downplayed the need for the team to implement wholesale changes, however, and insists that Haas is searching for small steps to escape its most recent rut.
The Italian has also defended Haas’ model of utilising its close technical ties with both Dallara and Ferrari, citing how the side has thrived previously using such a template.
“Nobody wants to be 10th here,” Steiner told RACER. “You feel the pressure, obviously, because you want to do better. If I didn’t feel the pressure then I would be happy with that, and I’m for sure not happy with where we are.
“I think what we need is to work hard and find the performance on the car so that we can get better… we know we can do it because we have done it before.
“We did this analysis of what we need to do. I think at the moment where we are is actually a help to move forward again, because you can rely on what we have got and what we have done before. If we now try to do everything ourselves, normally when you would do such a big step you have to make a step backward to do two forward, so the risk would be even bigger to be worse off than we are now for the short term.
“Obviously the mid and long term is a different story, but at the moment we need to get out of the hole in the short term in my opinion to show what we can do, and then we can think, ‘Could we allow ourselves to make a step backwards?’ But if you make a step backwards now, where do we end up?
“So at the moment we need to be patient and conscious and work with this business concept we are using now, with this model, and just try to get back to where we were a few years ago.”
Amid the financial ramifications posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, Haas opted to abandon development work on its 2021 challenger, the VF-21, and allocate resources to 2022.
That decision proved a masterstroke as the Kannapolis squad began the latest ground effect regulation cycle with a competitive midfield car, ending the year in eighth place.
But Steiner highlights how the changing landscape in F1 means that option is likely to be off the table, irrespective of whether it’s something that Haas would contemplate.
“You never want to do that — you cannot allow yourself to even think about that,” Steiner declared.
“It’s not like I can go out there and say, ‘Yeah, we’ve decided for two years we will definitely finish 10th.’ We have done that before when we were struggling in the COVID years; we cannot do that and we do not want to do that because we have also a responsibility to all the people who work here who put a lot of effort in to move forward.
“We just need to push that we do what we did before. We always were the smallest team and finished very well. It’s not like it’s just now; the last three or four years there was no bad team in Formula 1 — they were all very good.
“Everything is getting closer and closer together. I go back to the Brazilian qualifying — from P1 to P20 in Q1 there was around 0.8s. 0.8s is nothing.
“So it’s just like that little bit and that little more can move you quite a bit.”
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