24 January 2024 , 19:18
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Guenther Steiner plans to release a new book that has "changed a little bit" after he was let go by Haas.
Steiner conceived of the team a decade ago and got American businessman Gene Haas on board to fund and lend his name to the project. He served as team principal from the moment the team first began racing in 2016.
But that tenure came to an abrupt end earlier this month. It was announced that his contract had not been renewed and that director of engineering Ayao Komatsu would step up to replace him.
So Steiner will have a lot more spare time on his hands this year than he would have envisaged. Fortunately for him, he already has a new project in the works to which he can now devote some of that extra time.
He published his first book, Surviving to Drive, early last year. It was ghostwritten by author James Hogg in the style of a diary and shared Steiner's inside view of Haas' 2022 season. Published in the UK by Penguin Random House, it proved to be very popular with fans. Some 150,000 copies were sold across different markets - inspiring Steiner and Hogg to team up once again for another literary project.
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"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! [The first] was a completely new experience 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 is popular among fans for his brash, no-nonsense personality, showcased to the world through Netflix's Formula 1: Drive to Survive series. His fame and the things that have come from it, such as that first book, have led to accusations that he may have been distracted from his main role by all that noise, but Steiner insists that was not the case.
He added: "I think people are overrating that, how much distraction that is, 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."