Steiner denies outside ventures distracted Haas F1 duties

Former Haas Formula 1 boss Guenther Steiner has denied that working on a book or his various television appearances became a distraction during his time managing the American team.

Steiner’s debut book, titled Surviving to Drive, provided a behind-the-scenes insight into the Haas squad’s 2022 campaign, the first year of F1’s latest ground effect regulations.

Published in the UK by Penguin Random House, Steiner collaborated with ghostwriter James Hogg, who had previously worked with 1996 F1 World Champion Damon Hill.

The project proved a huge success, with the book selling 150,000 copies to date. Having initially only been available in hardback, a paperback copy will be released in March.

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Steiner has revealed that work on a second book had already been in the works prior to the news that he would not be retained at the helm of the Haas beyond the end of 2023.

“We are working on the second book at the moment,” Steiner told Motorsport.com. “That was planned already before. Now, obviously, the story maybe changes a little bit!”

Expanding upon the decision to authorise a second volume, Steiner expressed that he had enjoyed the experience of working with Hogg to produce an “organic” account.

“It was a completely new experience,” he said. “And I learned a lot about how some industries work, how things are done because I was never exposed to this before.

“And I actually enjoyed working with the writer, he is a cool dude, we had good fun. And he had good fun as well. He said hanging out with me was always good fun because it was never the pressure of ‘we need to do this’. It all came very organically.”

Steiner’s foray into the publishing industry came amid his stock rising exponentially in recent years following his appearances on the Netflix Drive to Survive docuseries.

However, the Italian has downplayed that the attention paid to these outside ventures contributed to Haas dropping to the bottom of the Constructors’ standings in 2023.

“I think people are overrating that, how much distraction that is,” he added. “Because it isn’t actually a lot of distraction from the daily job.

“Obviously on the race weekends, you need to work more. But for example, I didn’t have 20 [sponsor] appearances a weekend, I had maybe three maximum.

“It’s not like that is distracting, even writing the book. Obviously, a ghostwriter does it for you.

“Now I’ve got more time, but even now, we do two sessions a week of half an hour. We do one on Tuesday and one on Friday. That’s all I do, he does the rest.

“You speak with him, but it’s not like I spent days speaking with him. I know that some people have spent days speaking with these people, but I didn’t.

“I don’t think that is a big factor. I think that there were more benefits for the team than anything else about this because they got a lot of sponsors.”