"It all comes down to 8 years in, dead last": Haas team owner passes verdict on Guenther Steiner's regime
Gene Haas has issued a verdict on Guenther Steiner's stint as Haas' team principal and feels it was time for the team to try something different.
Pointing out how the American team was last in the championship after eight years was just not justifiable, Gene talked about how Haas needed a new direction, with Steiner's replacement Ayao Komatsu being the one to do that.
Haas has been on the F1 grid for eight years with Steiner at the top. The team had the best finish of P5 in 2018 but since then, it has regressed badly. Haas has finished two of the last three seasons in P10 (last) in the championship and has not been able to truly make the most of the benefit it gained with its partnership with Ferrari.
The one thing that has stood out has been the lack of understanding Haas has with its cars. The team has struggled to decode what truly works, which has been the case for the last few years.
In what was a damning indictment of Guenther Steiner, team owner Gene Haas touched on the fact why the team was appointing Ayao Komatsu as its new team principal.
“We looked from within, at who had most experience. Ayao has been with the team since day one, he knows the ins and outs of it. My biggest concern is when we go to Bahrain, we need to show up with a car that is ready to go. Maybe having more of a managerial-type and engineering approach, we’ll see if that has benefits," he told F1.com.
“I think Guenther had more of a human-type approach to everything with people and the way he interacted with people, he was very good at that. Ayao is very technical, he looks at things based on statistics – this is what we’re doing bad, where can we do better. It’s a different approach. We really do need something different because we weren’t really doing that well. Like I said, it all comes down to eight years in, dead last. Nothing more I can say on that,” Gene added.
Gene Haas explains why he went with Ayao Komatsu
In the interview, Gene Haas further explained why the team went with Ayao Komatsu and not someone from the outside.
Talking about the philosophy involved in the decision-making progress, Gene said that it came down to the fact that Komatsu was a known entity,
“I’ve been running Haas Automation for over 40 years now. Bringing people in from the outside, it takes them time to learn, six months to a year, and a lot of time you don’t even like them. It’s better to take people you know, and even if they are not the perfect fit, at least you know what you’re going to get," Gene said.
“That’s really worked out pretty well for us here at Haas Automation, so I’m really applying a lot of the building blocks that were here to the Formula 1 team. I really like to have people that I know, who understand the day-to-day operations, understand the people, [rather] than bringing in a stranger who is going to stir everything up and create a mess,” he added.
Haas is going through turmoil right now and it will be interesting to see how and if it can recover from it.