The Haas team is floating on air after the successful start in Bahrain and knows that the increase would not have been possible with the old drivers
The earlier media Thursday was actually abolished on the part of Formula One, but two teams nevertheless held their pre-event Q&A sessions ahead of the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix on Thursday: Ferrari and Haas.
Ferrari is used to a lot of questions; Haas is rather unusual, but after Kevin Magnussen’s P5 at the season opener in Bahrain, it’s not surprising.
For Günther Steiner it must have been a liberating experience not to be asked about sporting crises, conflicts between the drivers or problems with sponsors. His master plan to completely write off 2021 and instead put all his eggs in the 2022 basket seems to have worked out.
The drivers played a decisive role in this. Mick Schumacher fell behind Magnussen purely in terms of results, but seems happy to finally have a leading figure in the Dane to look to for guidance. Nikita Masepin was not. With the Russian, who is considered difficult, the whole dynamic in the team was less positive.
Question for Steiner: Would you be third in the Constructors’ World Championship with Masepin? “Who knows,” he waves it off. “I don’t know, can’t give a long answer to that. The fact that we brought Kevin back certainly showed what is possible. I guess a result like that would have been very difficult with Nikita and Mick.”
That could be interpreted as gentle criticism of the 2021 Haas drivers, but Steiner has always come to their defence. He has always preached that you can’t expect the same performance from a rookie as from seasoned Formula 1 drivers like Magnussen or Romain Grosjean.
Steiner’s successful start to the season goes down like oil. After the loss of the Russian main sponsor, such a result is helpful in the search for partners. But: “It’s not always about money,” he says and turns to the journalists: “You always think it’s all about money. But for us it’s also about our pride. “
“That is very important for us,” the South Tyrolean emphasises. “I don’t do everything just for the money. You really have to want to do it. For the sake of racing. We love racing. Gene Haas was happy and said to me, ‘Günther, you said we would be back.’ I guess now we’re back. “
For Steiner, the important thing now is that Haas seizes its opportunities when they present themselves – as the team managed to do in 2018, the team’s best season in Formula One so far (fifth in the Constructors’ World Championship). But for that to happen, the pace of further development has to be right. Something Steiner believes his engineers are “absolutely” capable of.
For a podium, you have to be “in the right place at the right time”, he knows: “I don’t know if we’re that lucky. But when the opportunity presents itself, we have to be there. In the past two years, there have been some podiums that you didn’t expect. I would be very happy if we could do the same.”
So far, Haas has not gone beyond a fourth-place finish (Grosjean in Austria in 2018). In 2021, a twelfth-place finish by Schumacher at the Hungarian Grand Prix was the best result of the season. There are many reasons for the improvement in form. But one of them, everyone agrees, is the improved Ferrari engine.
