Guenther Steiner’s greatest F1 moments: From first to ‘fok!’

In the age of media-trained platitudes, Guenther Steiner stood out as one of the last true ‘characters’ in Formula 1.

The news that the effing-and-blinding Italian has now departed as boss of the Haas F1 team means the world championship will be a less colourful place.

Though American businessman and NASCAR team owner Gene Haas picked up the tab, the Haas F1 team was very much built in Steiner’s image – illustrated perfectly by his starring role in the hit Netflix series Drive to Survive.

This lead to him being involved in instantly ‘meme-able’ GP moments and coining phrases which have been used in the racing vernacular ever since.

We pick out six of the best moments from Steiner’s ups and downs.

 

Haas finishes sixth on debut – 2016 Australian GP

It’s best to start at the beginning – and in the beginning Haas did rather well.

With a 2016 VF-16 car partly-comprised with bits from the Maranello spares bin (as per rules allowing teams to buy certain parts from others), Romain Grosjean came home sixth on the team’s Australian GP debut.

Having qualified on the penultimate row of the grid, the Frenchman rose to tenth before a safety car triggered by Fernando Alonso’s huge crash with Haas team-mate Esteban Gutierrez. This meant Grosjean could put on the medium tyre and duly run a canny 39 laps to the end, finishing a brilliant sixth – the first time a team had scored points on debut since Toyota 14 years earlier.

“Yesterday I said I was looking forward to the race, but to finish it in the points is a dream come true,” related Steiner after the GP, presumably with a few ‘F-bombs’ edited out.

It’s a shame we never got Guenther’s verdict on Grosjean’s hapless (and in 2016, pointless) colleague Gutierrez, someone else also fished out of the Ferrari recycling box.

 

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From rockstars to ‘****ers’ – 2018 Australian GP

Two years on and things weren’t going quite so swimmingly.

After finishing a solid eighth in the 2016 championship, it appeared that Haas had a good base from which to build on. It furthered this with decent results in ’17, before Grosjean and new team-mate Kevin Magnussen qualified an impressive seventh and sixth at Melbourne respectively in the 2018 opener.

The pair were running a brilliant fourth and fifth before it all went wrong in the space of just two laps. Magnussen’s left rear wasn’t secured properly at his first stop on lap 21, forcing him to stop on track, before Grosjean’s front left came loose in similar circumstances less than five minutes later.

Captured by Netflix’s Drive to Survive cameras, it prompted Steiner to exclaim the soon-to-be immortal words on the phone to team owner Gene: “We just ****ed it up. Fourth and fifth, we look like rockstars – now we look like ****ers! Bunch of ****ing clowns.”

With this utterance – gilding one of many incoming calamities for F1’s most beleaguered team – Steiner had already sealed his fate as a fan favourite for viewers of the series.

 

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Big Rich Energy – 2019

Though Haas would finish a brilliant fifth in the constructors’ championship in 2018, things would go on the downward slide a year later.

Following a trait which would haunt Steiner until his exit from the team, the Banbury squad produced a car which was often dynamite in qualifying, but would then lunch its tyres during the race and end up nowhere.

This began in 2019 – a season when Haas attracted as much attention to itself as possible by announcing title sponsor Rich Energy, run by eccentric entrepreneur William Storey.

After Storey helicoptered into a glitzy launch at the Royal Automobile in Pall Mall London – covered in skin-crawling detail by Netflix – the car struggled for performance in races.

Summarised as “We are overheating. We are ***ing slow,” by Steiner after a painful Austrian GP, Storey then announced on social media that he was pulling the Haas title sponsorship.

The Haas pair then collided at the British GP and Steiner is caught by Netflix unfurling 16 ‘F-bombs’ in two minutes at his drivers in a seminal scene, before the boss responds to moody Magnussen’s reaction with the dressing down: “He does not ‘fok’ smash my door.” Another Steiner-ism for the books.

 

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Grosjean’s fireball – 2020 Bahrain GP

It’s not all comedy gold – Grosjean’s horrifying near-fatal crash at the 2020 Bahrain GP became central to the third series, showing us the more vulnerable human side of Steiner and his team.

“You can’t do anything. You’re just a passenger to this,” he says in describing the feeling of being stranded trackside, witnessing such an accident.

“The world seems to be coming down on you. Once you see fire, that’s the worst thing you can have. This is bad. Everything goes through your head – you don’t think anyone can get out alive of this one.”

Incredibly, after a period wedged under the barrier and engulfed in a conflagration, Grosjean emerges from the flames relatively unscathed – much to the paddock’s relief.

Steiner pays tribute to the FIA staff in the medical who helped the Frenchman escape, saying he wants to thank them via some grateful ‘F-bombs’: “****ing hell, they’ve done a great job.”.

 

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Steiner ship – 2021

The Steinership has sunk….💔 https://t.co/M6H33CSa0P pic.twitter.com/wdoykbrZ57

— BuchoBrian (@_brianseraph) January 10, 2024

Back to the everyday bureaucracy of F1: in 2020 and ’21 Steiner found himself scrambling to keep Haas alive in the midst of Covid and owner Gene’s reluctance to keep picking up the bill.

The answer was to bring in two drivers with considerable backing. Nikita Mazepin, son of Vladimir Putin’s great chum and Uralkali oligarch Dmitri, and Mick Schumacher, son of F1 legend Michael and F2/F3 champion.

With Schumacher, Steiner finds himself endorsing every product under the sun to bring in the funds – from a giant toy ship to a sauna. He quips to Netflix that it has “Always been my dream to been my dream to be in a Lidl catalogue.”

 

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No more Russians – 2021/2022

Few drivers have attracted controversy in recent years like the Russian Nikita Mazepin.

Banned for punching F3 rival Callum Ilott in the face in 2016, he then courted even more controversy in 2020 where he appeared to inappropriately grope a woman’s breasts in an Instagram story he posted.

This came shortly after being announced at Haas for 2021 – despite a huge public outcry, Mazepin was retained, with Uralkali reportedly paying huge sums for the seat.

When the season started, the Russian clearly wasn’t up to physical or racing scratch, crashing out on his debut in the opening corners at Bahrain.

Instead of knuckling down, Mazepin moans incessantly about the situation, prompting another Steiner classic via Netflix: “****ing hell! That’s why people hate you!”

When Mazepin is jettisoned on the eve of the next season following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Steiner declares “No more Russians. I’m done with Russians until I go from this planet.”

 

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First at last (sort of) –2022 Sao Paulo GP

The 2022 Sao Paulo GP saw what will likely be Haas’s – and certainly Steiner’s – greatest moment in F1, as Kevin Magnussen scored pole position for the sprint race in Brazil.

Just managing to nip out and get a banker lap in as a brooding sky darkened in Q3, a 1min 11.674sec time put the Dane at the top of the timing screens.

When George Russell beached his Mercedes at Turn 4, the red flag came out – and the heavens opened.

This meant no-one could beat the ‘K-Mag’ time, and so the Haas would start first on the Saturday.

“This is something we all dream about,” said Steiner afterwards. “We have worked hard for seven years. This is not luck – it was well deserved.

“When it rains soup you need to have a spoon ready, and we had a spoon ready today!”