MPH: Were Haas failings due to Steiner or a lack of cash? We'll see...

Interesting times at Haas F1 as the man behind the whole programme, Guenther Steiner, has parted company with the team, unable to agree with owner Gene Haas about the way forward.

It’s all been brought to a head by the team’s very difficult 2023 season in which the car, whist occasionally pretty good in qualifying, was invariably hopelessly bad at looking after its tyres in the races. The fundamental nature of the problem was never properly understood – and even the introduction of key features of the ’24 car in a late-season update brought nothing. In fact Nico Hülkenberg was adamant the old car was better.

Both the tyre problem and the lack of progress were very familiar themes from previous Haas seasons. Steiner was adamant the problem lay in the quality of the team’s simulation tools. The problem wasn’t running budget: they were actually at the budget cap. The problem wasn’t that they couldn’t afford to develop the car; it was simply that the developments weren’t adding performance.

“That’s the story of our season,” said Hülkenberg after the season’s final race, where in the old-spec car he comfortably beat Kevin Magnussen’s new-spec machine. “We didn’t develop anything and totally got overtaken and out-developed and hence we’re last today. That’s the root cause. We need to really address that coming into next year. We have to prove it, when the time comes. We need to look at what we’ve done and what we have. Maybe we need to make some changes, because what we’ve done this year didn’t work, but that’s some big questions going into winter break now.”

Steiner, in the bluff no-nonsense way he has, was pushing very hard to encourage Gene Haas to invest further in the team, to prevent it being left behind. Gene feels he has invested enough in the team already. Technical director Simone Resta was similarly frustrated by the tools at his disposal. He too has left the team.

The team is of course structured in a unique way, its design and technology base integrated within Ferrari’s Maranello walls and the team taking almost all of its mechanical hardware from Ferrari. The aero team is then left to create its own concept around that, using Ferrari’s wind tunnel. Dallara is still involved in aspects of the design and the race team operates out of Banbury in the UK. It’s proven a very cost-effective way of being in F1, but there are now questions of whether its time has passed. The technology of how to extrapolate from tunnel data has moved on and requires capital investment and a tighter integration between departments.

The question is whether this was a team operating as well as it could given the tools at its disposal. Or whether the tools were perfectly adequate and not being managed effectively. New team principal Ayao Komatsu (former trackside engineering chief) now gets to make the case that it was the latter. Let’s see…