12 January 2024 , 17:31
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Gene Haas has made it clear he has no interest in selling his Formula 1 team to Michael Andretti.
And he doesn't want to let it go to anyone, for that matter. The American businessman, 71, insists he is in F1 for the long haul despite sacking team principal Guenther Steiner, with whom he set up his racing outfit a decade ago, this week.
Steiner's abrupt exit was a shock when it was announced on Wednesday. The 58-year-old has been in charge since the team's inception, having been the one to approach Haas about the idea of forming a new American racing outfit.
He was also very popular among F1 fans thanks to his starring role on the Netflix Drive to Survive docu-series. But poor results saw Steiner relieved of his duties and replaced by director of engineering Ayao Komatsu.
The upheaval has led to suggestions Haas might be willing to cash in after a decade of funding the team that finished rock bottom last year. But the 71-year-old insists he has no interest in giving up on the venture.
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"I didn’t get into F1 to sell [the team], I did it because I wanted to race. Guenther had the same perspective," he told the F1 website. "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."
Gene Haas insists his eponymous F1 team is not for sale (Getty Images)That declaration will be a blow to Andretti. He is currently focussed on building a new team from scratch and already has FIA approval to do so, but F1 chiefs will make the final decision on whether or not to allow an 11th team and there has been a lot of resistance to the idea on that side of the argument.
Should he be met with a final rejection, then the American's only route onto the F1 grid will be to buy one of the existing teams. Given the sport's popularity right now, there is reluctance to sell across the board and Haas would surely have been one of his best options, prior to the owner's declaration that the team is not on the market.
Given Haas' reluctance to invite investment, then, many will question how he plans to turn his bottom-dwelling team into one capable of fighting at the front. But the American insists the problem is not a lack of cash, but the way funds have been spent in recent years.
"There is a perception we spend a lot less money - we're usually within 10 million dollars of the budget limit," he said. "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 - [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."