31 January 2023 , 17:12
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Guenther Steiner may have a much larger budget to play with at Haas these days, but he insists it will not mean any structural changes within the team.
At last year's United States Grand Prix, Haas announced its lucrative new partnership with title sponsor MoneyGram. It means that, after years of trying to compete in a much smaller budget than their rivals, the team will be able to operate at the cost cap going forward.
It means, from the financial perspective at least, Haas are no longer the underdogs of the F1 grid. But even though their operations have been constrained by a lack of finances in recent year, Steiner insists there is no plan to alter the way his team works.
Instead, he told Motorsport.com, the extra cash will be poured straight into car development in the hope of pushing themselves further up the grid. "We want to invest the money in the car," the team principal said.
"At the moment, whatever we have got, we invest in the car. There is nothing that you want to do outside at the moment. The system we have got, we just want to stabilise it and just make sure that we use everything to make the car go quick, nothing else.
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"We are not focusing on other stuff, [saying] 'oh we want to do this ourselves' – no. Let's stabilise how we do it now, and then if we want to change something, change it after, because otherwise if you try to do too much, we trip over.
Guenther Steiner is planning no operational changes despite an influx of cash at Haas (Getty Images,)"At the moment, we stick with the model, get the best out of it. If we can find savings or better investments within the budget cap by doing parts ourselves, then we do that afterwards. But not straight away."
Steiner was speaking after his team lifted the covers off the livery design of its VF-23 challenger to be used this season. MoneyGram logos are noticeable in several places on the cars, while the most obvious change is the colour scheme.
Their last few efforts have been white-based cars with red trim – their 2021 car also had splashes of blue, making it reminiscent of the Russian flag, a nod to their former sponsors Uralkali. But their 2023 machines features much more black and appeared to go down well with many F1 fans on social media.