Guenther Steiner is that rare thing in modern motor sport: a genuine character; a straight-talking, old-school racer in an era of corporate jargon and marketing polish. Not despite that, but rather because of it, he has become a cult hero to millions thanks to his gloriously unfiltered appearances on Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive to Survive, cussing his way into the hearts of fans across the globe. But, while the world may have discovered him quite recently as the irascible boss of the Haas Formula 1 team, swearing at broken front wings, poor strategy calls, and of course his wincing drivers, his story is far longer, far more varied, and far more interesting than that.

Now 60, Steiner has spent four decades in the racing world, from the rough-and-tumble stages of rallying to the glossy boardrooms of F1 factories, without ever applying for any of the jobs that propelled him forwards. The only position for which he has ever formally applied was his very first: as a Mazda rally mechanic in Belgium. That was in 1986. He has never sent a CV since.

And, now, with his F1 chapter closed – for the moment, anyway – he is about to reinvent himself yet again, this time as a MotoGP team owner. Yes, really: the man who once ran Jaguar’s F1 set-up for Niki Lauda, and built Haas F1 from nothing, is now going two-wheeled. As Steiner puts it, “It’s cool as shit.”

But to understand how a butcher’s son from the mountains of South Tyrol got to where he now is, you have to go back – way back. “I was born in Merano, in South Tyrol, in the north of Italy, very close to the Austrian border,” Steiner begins. “My parents weren’t rich. They came from nothing actually. They had to make their own success. So they opened a butcher’s shop – to give my sister and me the best they could – and they always worked very hard, both of them. I helped my dad in the shop.” There is a calm pride in his voice: not nostalgia, not sentimentality, just a rock-solid memory of a work ethic instilled young, the kind that does not merely shape a career, but also shapes a life.

“Motor sport was very small where I was brought up,” he continues. “It was all about skiing, and ice hockey too, but mainly skiing. I’m not a good skier because I preferred ice hockey. On Sundays, instead of going skiing, I always played ice hockey.” It is safe to say that Steiner’s childhood did not hint at future F1 greatness. Indeed, his parents were not remotely interested in racing. The mountain air was not full of the scent of Castrol R. But then a famously toothy Austrian came along.

“Niki Lauda was very prominent in Austria and our part of northern Italy when I was a kid,” Steiner recalls, “because he was F1 world champion for Ferrari in the 1970s [in 1975 and 1977, when young Guenther was 10 and 12 respectively]. So that triggered my interest. I watched every grand prix on TV. There was only one local motor sport event – the Bolzano-Mendola hillclimb – about 40km from our home. I used to beg my dad to take me to it every year. I must have been about seven when that started.”

Still, the idea of working in motor sport never occurred to him. “To be honest, I didn’t even understand that you could make a living out of motor sport,” he says, chuckling. “It was too far distant for me. I liked to watch it, but I never thought about working in it. It wasn’t even my dream. I never wanted to be a racing driver. Racing was something I watched, and I enjoyed, but I wasn’t trying to find a way into it.”

So Steiner did an apprenticeship as a regular mechanic, then he did his national service. He was now 20, and his father had died, so, casting around for something to bend his mind to, “I said to myself, ‘Maybe I want to experience something different, something new.’ I saw an ad in [the German motoring and motor sport magazine] Auto Motor und Sport – ‘Mechanics wanted for Mazda in Belgium’ – so I applied.

“I drove to Belgium for the interview,” he remembers, warming to his story. “The chief engineer was German, so we did the interview in German – thank God – because I didn’t speak English at all back then. I spoke only German and Italian. Anyway, they offered me a job.”

“I couldn’t believe Niki knew who I was. He was a superstar and a legend. He was a hero of mine”

And, with that, young Guenther packed up and moved. “It was a simpler time in motor sport back then,” he recalls. “It was more like being in a travelling circus than working at a regular job. I took my first ever flight in 1986, to Finland, when I was 21, to work at the 1000 Lakes Rally.” After a few years with Mazda, he returned to Italy. He freelanced in a number of rallying roles, then he began to climb through the rallying ranks. “I worked for Top Run in 1989 and 1990, then I joined Jolly Club in 1991, running the wonderful Lancia Integrale in the World Rally Championship. Those were Lancia’s glory years.”

In 1997 came a call from David Richards. “He asked me to manage Prodrive’s European Rally Championship team,” Steiner remembers. “I could speak English OK by then. I asked my wife if she fancied moving to England. She said, ‘Yeah, why not?’” It was in Banbury that the one-time itinerant rally mechanic, now in his thirties, began to transition into senior management – and, crucially, into a leader. From Prodrive he moved to Malcolm Wilson’s M-Sport, where he led the development programme that made the Ford Focus a World Rally Championship winner, then came the phone call that changed his life, and still seems almost unbelievable today.

“One day in 2000 my phone rang. A woman said, ‘Mr Lauda would like to speak with you. Can he call you?’” Let’s pause here. Just imagine it. Niki Lauda – a three-time F1 world champion, a global icon, an airline tycoon – cold-calling a rally man working in Cumbria whom he had never met.

“I’d never spoken to Niki before,” Steiner says. “I’d never even been in the same room as him. I couldn’t believe he even knew who I was. I mean: Niki was Niki, a superstar and a legend. He was a hero of mine, an absolute hero. Anyway, he called me and he said he was running Jaguar Racing, the F1 team, which was owned by Ford. He’d been looking for someone to help him run it, and I’d been recommended to him by Tyrone Johnson, who’d been at Ford for ever – he joined Ford straight out of university in fact. Anyway, as I say, Ford owned Jaguar at that time, and I was working for M-Sport doing work for Ford, and I knew Tyrone, and Tyrone knew Niki. So that was the link. Anyway, Niki asked me to meet him for dinner in Vienna.”

They sat down together at a table in a fine-dining Viennese restaurant. Everyone had warned Guenther that the meal would be a 20-minute test of nerves, after which Lauda would make his excuses and bolt for the door. “Niki was famously impatient,” Steiner explains, “but we spoke for two hours. Amazingly, he never mentioned a job even once. The next morning, he called me and said, ‘Thank you for your time. You’re going to be working for me.’

“I thought, ‘What the f***?’ But obviously I didn’t phrase my reaction that way. I said, ‘Mr Lauda, what work am I going to do for you?’ He said, ‘I don’t know. I’ll tell you later.’”

Thus began Steiner’s F1 career. He joined Jaguar Racing in 2001, as managing director, reporting directly to Lauda, and he entered a political maelstrom. “Jaguar were doing shit,” Steiner says with typically unvarnished candour, “but I got on well with [Jaguar Racing’s number one driver] Eddie Irvine. He was coming to the end of his F1 career, but he was honest and straight-talking. I learned a lot about F1 from him – and of course from Niki as well.”

“I was doing OK at Red Bull but I could see that it was getting congested at the senior levels”

If Lauda was all instinct, more knee-jerk than strategy, Ford’s senior execs were the opposite: suited and booted, buttoned-down, and PowerPoint-wielding. “They could hardly have been more different from a cultural point of view,” Steiner says. “Actually, there were not only two cultures, but three or four. There was Niki, there were the German career executives like Dr [Wolfgang] Reitzle, and there were the dyed-in-the-wool American car guys. Then there was me, trying to pick up the pieces.”

Despite the chaos, Steiner thrived – until, that is, Ford changed the guard. “When they brought in Tony Purnell and David Pitchforth, and they got rid of Niki, they offered me the team principal job, but reporting to Tony and Dave. Well, my allegiance was to Niki. I didn’t see myself doing what needed to be done under Tony’s and David’s leadership. So I left.”

It turned out to be a wise move. Purnell and Pitchforth were and are both clever chaps, but within a year the Jaguar F1 team had been sold to Red Bull. Christian Horner duly came in. “Christian started in December 2004,” Steiner explains. “He and I knew each other already. He’d been trying to get himself into an F1 team for a while. He’d tried with Jordan and Arrows, and he finally made it stick with Jaguar when Red Bull bought the team. I started in January 2005. I was operations director, and I stayed about a year and a half. I was doing OK initially, but after a while I could see that it was getting a bit congested at the senior levels. I don’t really like that sort of thing, so I left.”

Did Horner already have the mien of a future F1 titan, I wonder? “Ah, it’s hard to say,” Guenther replies, scratching his chin. “He was in his early thirties back then, remember. I guess you could say he took the best part of 20 years to develop into what he eventually became. Back then he was just a former racing driver who’d run a Formula 3000 team. Oh and he hadn’t been a very good driver, actually, as Zak Brown always reminds him, because they raced each other a few times and Zak jokes that Christian was the only guy he could be sure of beating. But Dr [Dietrich] Mateschitz [the Red Bull co-founder, co-owner, and head honcho] believed in Christian.”

By 2006, tiring as he puts it of the “senior congestion” within Red Bull’s F1 operation, Steiner began to allow his attention to drift elsewhere. “I’d always wanted to live in the States – and Dr Mateschitz offered me a role in NASCAR,” he says. “I didn’t know anything about NASCAR, but I asked my wife what she thought of the idea, and she replied, ‘Let’s try it.’” So they moved to Mooresville, North Carolina – NASCAR country – and so began yet another chapter in the multistoried life and works of Guenther Steiner, who was now in his early forties.

However, by 2009, his NASCAR adventure was already over. Not everything works out. Even so, Steiner stayed Stateside. “I found that I liked living there. Soon we had a daughter. We wanted to bring her up in America. So I co-founded a company, Fibreworks Composites, and we based it in Mooresville, and we built it up from five people to 300 people. We work in motor sport, of course, but also in custom design, engineering, transportation, aerospace, defence, even medical. It’s still based in Mooresville. We still live in Mooresville.”

“I suggested a US-based F1 team using some Ferrari tech, working carefully within regulations”

Also in Mooresville came a chance meeting with the F1 journalist, broadcaster and would-be team boss Peter Windsor. “I bumped into Peter in a coffee shop in Mooresville. I asked him what the hell he was doing there, because Mooresville is a NASCAR town, and Peter is an F1 guy, not a NASCAR guy. He wouldn’t tell me, but I later found out that he was trying to start USF1 [a stillborn US-based F1 team] with Chad Hurley, the YouTube guy [a co-founder and former CEO of YouTube in fact]. A little while later Chad contacted me, because he thought that my company, Fibreworks Composites, might be able to help USF1, but it didn’t work out. Still, it had planted a seed in my mind. I thought: maybe I can do something different. So I spoke to Mr [Giampaolo] Dallara [the founder of his eponymous racing car constructor], and Mr [Stefano] Domenicali [who was then the team principal of Ferrari], and I suggested a US-based F1 team using some Ferrari tech, working carefully within the F1 regulations.”

Steiner wrote a business plan. Ferrari agreed to it. Bernie Ecclestone didn’t say no – which, as Steiner puts it, “is as close to support as you get from Bernie”. By 2014 they had the necessary licence. By 2016 they were racing in F1.

Guenther is clearly proud of Haas, although he is never boastful about it. “Most people in the other teams were reasonably encouraging,” he says. “They may not have liked the idea very much because it was new and different, but they respected it, and they realised it was legitimate and fair. Well, pretty much all of them. Well, to be precise, all of them except Ron Dennis [the McLaren chairman], who gave me shit in a team principals’ meeting. He said we were circumventing the regulations. I replied, ‘The regulations are available to everyone, so you can read them if you like. Oh and if you don’t have a copy, just go on the internet and you’ll find them.’ There was an atmosphere then, because people didn’t talk to Ron like that. But I wasn’t nasty – I just explained that I’d followed the regulations. Even so, by the time I’d finished saying what I had to say, Ron was on his feet and shouting at me. It was pretty good fun.

“In the beginning, when we set out, Ferrari asked us if we could run Esteban Gutiérrez in one of our cars, and for the other car we were initially talking to Nico Hülkenberg. And we nearly did a deal with him actually, but at the last minute he called me and said he’d decided to change his mind. So then I had to find a team-mate for Esteban, and quite quickly I did a deal with Romain Grosjean.

“Romain’s highs are high and his lows are low. But on a good day he’s quick, very quick. In fact, on a good day you wouldn’t want anyone else. But on a bad day you’d definitely want someone else. Anyway, we went for Romain and Esteban, and we spoke to Kevin Magnussen also, and Kevin left a very good impression on me and Gene [Haas, the owner of his eponymous F1 team] because you could see how much he wanted the job. I mean, the guy just wanted to drive a race car, but we were a little bit scared of hiring him for 2016 because, although he’d raced well for McLaren in 2014, he hadn’t raced at all in 2015. He’d been McLaren’s reserve driver that year, and we wanted drivers with current up-to-date experience. But for our second year, 2017, when we were looking for a replacement for Esteban, and Kevin had current experience again because he’d been racing for Renault in 2016, we went for him.

“I always liked Kevin. I liked his spirit. You know: going racing, simple, no bullshit. When he’s in a good car, he’s the best. But when the car isn’t so good, maybe he sometimes gives up a bit too quickly, in my opinion, and I don’t know where that comes from. But Romain and Kevin were a great line-up for us for four seasons [2017-2020].

“When Covid came along, in 2020, we mothballed everything during that season, and we didn’t do any development at all, so I knew that our 2021 car was going to be very bad. I even told Romain and Kevin to look for other drives. Anyway, we got Nikita Mazepin and Mick Schumacher for 2021. Nikita brought money with him, and Ferrari was supportive of Mick.

“What Nikita did with that girl was stupid and wrong [in late 2020 Mazepin was filmed inappropriately touching a woman in a car, which action he himself described as “a huge mistake”]. Nikita’s father was absolutely furious with him about it, because he’d given him this golden opportunity yet he went and did something so idiotic.

“By the time I’d finished saying what I had to say, Ron Dennis was on his feet and shouting at me”

“Anyway, then Putin invaded Ukraine [which meant that Mazepin, a Russian citizen, would no longer be permitted to race in F1], and I don’t remember who else was available at the time, but there was no one free who was great, and we had no time to find anyone anyway. Gene asked me, ‘Do you know what Kevin is doing?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I just ran into him a few weeks ago at Daytona, because he was racing a Cadillac in IMSA for Chip Ganassi.’ So I put the telephone down on Gene and I called Kevin straight away. That’s how he got back in. He was contracted to Peugeot’s WEC team for 2022, but he told me, ‘Oh, don’t worry, I think I can get out of that contract.’

“People said Kevin was lucky, because he only got his chance to get back into F1 because of Putin, but actually we were lucky, to be able to get such a good driver at such short notice, and a guy who already knew our team. Because Haas as a team is different, you know? And getting used to a new team is always difficult – just look at Lewis Hamilton at Ferrari this year. And when Kevin came back it felt like he’d been away for only a week or two, then he scored points in Bahrain straight away, in the first race of the season. It was great.”

Then came the chaos, the fun, the Netflix boom, and the Steiner memes. Suddenly, Guenther was famous. “I didn’t expect us to be featured in Drive to Survive very much,” he says, leaning back in his chair and laughing fit to bust, “so I just behaved like the cameras weren’t there. I forgot I was mic’d up. When the premiere came out, I didn’t go – but at the next team principals’ meeting everyone was talking about me. And I was like, ‘F***, did they really put all that swearing in?’”

Yes; yes, they did; and fans loved it.

But behind the scenes there were frictions: disagreements with Gene Haas about direction, strategy, spending, development and more. “In the end,” Steiner says, “I was fine with it. Gene can do what he wants, and I can do what I want. I’m 60. Financially secure. I can work if I want, but I don’t have to.”

Would he embark on yet another new project, or would he relax at home in Mooresville, while keeping a weather eye on Fibreworks Composites and enjoying family life? “Well, I went to a MotoGP race in Austin, in April 2024,” he says, smiling. “I only went there for fun, but I thought, ‘This is cool; maybe I could run a MotoGP team?’ So I started looking. I’ve got good investment contacts, so I spoke to a few people, and we got the money together to buy Tech3.”

He will take over on January 1, 2026. He says that he will not go to every race, but that he will be deeply involved – just as he was deeply involved at Haas, at Jaguar, at M-Sport and at Prodrive.

And if F1 ever came calling again, what would his reaction be? “Never say never,” he says, frowning, “but it would have to be a project, not a job. I’m done with just doing a job.”

That seems like a good moment to finish. But I have one final question: what makes him happiest? “Ah, well, it makes me happiest when I’m doing something exciting and new,” he says. “Always I want to keep engaged. I don’t need to work to pay my bills. Besides, work isn’t all about money. I could have made more money in my life, but I like to experiment, to take risks, and to create, and I don’t take myself too seriously. If I fail, it’s alright.”

Born: 07/04/1965, Merano, Italy

• 1986 Moves to Belgium as a mechanic for Mazda’s WRC campaign.
• 1989 Returns to Italy with Top Run Motorsport as assistant team manager.
• 1991 Becomes head of reconnaissance and then technical manager at Jolly Club.
• 1997 A shift to the UK with Prodrive.
• 1998 Recruited by M-Sport as project manager, then director of engineering.
• 2001 Switches to F1’s Jaguar Racing.
• 2005 Joins Red Bull as technical operations director; helps establish a NASCAR team in the US.
• 2009 Starts Fibreworks Composites.
• 2014 Becomes team principal at Haas F1; in 2016 the team starts GP racing.
• 2019 Becomes the unlikely star of Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive to Survive.
• 2024 Departs Haas; UK live show tour.
• 2025 Announces MotoGP future.