In 2014, Gene Haas took on the parts of the failed Marussia team and built a new American Formula 1 team in Kannapolis, North Carolina. The team was put together and ready for the 2016 season and has been in the sport for half a decade. The first six laps of the 2020 season were by far the worst start to a Grand Prix season the team has had so far. On Wednesday, the team announced that it had signed the new Concorde agreement with all of the other nine teams to commit to F1 for another 5 years.
Here’s the thing … does it matter?
With four failures and seven other non-points, Haas has only achieved one World Cup point in 2020. Kevin Magnussen and Romain Grosjean have been teammates at Haas since 2017 when Esteban Gutierrez left, and the team has given no indication that it will change its driver pairing anytime soon, although the pair are mediocre at best. Haas has scored 198 points in five racing seasons. That is fewer points than Mercedes scored in the first six races of this season. Despite having a reasonably decent car for the 2018 season, no Haas driver made the podium.
The team doesn’t seem to be trying anything new and is happy to just roll around at the very back of the grid. It’s rare for his drivers to even drop out of the first quarter on Saturday’s qualifying on race weekends. And as can be seen from two seasons of Drive to Survive on Netflix, the team and drivers don’t seem to respect each other enough for any of that to matter. The team is on a shit show and I’m trying to figure out what exactly it is doing.
Perhaps the team thought it could just wait its time for the budget cap to go into effect next year, and they gave up 2020 and 2021 altogether in hopes that their 2022 car would be better than the best VF-20 -Chassis it has now. Maybe there is a chance to turn the team around and make it a mid-pack team with an eye to the occasional podium in the next five years, but if the past five years have been any signs of that, I kind of doubt it.
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Gene Haas reportedly spends $ 173 million to have his name on the side of his own F1 team cars. Aside from an uh, turbulent half season of Rich Energy sponsorship, the cars didn’t see much of sponsor decals. The team is backed by Alpinestars and Richard Mille watches, but it’s Gen’s own CNC shop that otherwise adorns the car. Sure, a B2B company doesn’t get much of that back-of-the-pack marketing spend, but competitor DMG Mori has sponsored Porsche’s LMP1 team with far less visibility. So what do i know?
In early 2020, I would have been skeptical that Haas would exist in the 2021 season, as even the drivers weren’t sure if their team’s future was safe. Will it survive all five seasons that it says it will build a car and compete? It will be necessary to build a better car, hire some better drivers, and probably get rid of those Ferrari engines.
The post The Haas F1 team has committed to another five years in F1, but what is it about? first appeared on monter-une-startup.
