F1: Can Haas Make the Midfield in Their Debut Season?
By Mark Gero
The brand is the same, but the sport has changed. Mandatory Credit: Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports
In only a very small amount of time, the American Haas F1 team is slowly making the final decision on who will drive for them in their debut season next year. Three main challengers, Mexican Estaban Gutierrez, Frenchman Jean-Eric Vergne and this year’s LeMans winner, German Nico Hulkenberg are the final selections, with only two making the grade.
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While all this anticipation is going on, Gene Haas himself believes that in their debut year, they should immediately reach up to the midfield and compete with such teams as Red Bull and Williams, leaving out just Mercedes and Ferrari to work on. However, by the record of old and of history in this sport, teams that are in their first season of formula one are more possible of folding. Organizations such as HRT and more recently, Caterham, have liquefied their assets. Manor, which was called Marussia last year, is just barely staying above float. To make matters even worse, Lotus F1 are trying to sell off to French manufacture Renault, but the auto giant is contemplating the situation, because of such high debt in the Enstone based team. If these talks fail or go somewhere else for Renault to be interested in, then Lotus could go bankrupt unless they can find a more suitable sponsor, who could have a difficult time paying the bills the team owes.
But despite all of these problems, Haas feels that his team can be different from the others, mainly because of his latest association with Ferrari. Haas can also count on previous success in NASCAR, with the two according to the Californian, are closely aligned as far as business strategy.
“We [Haas Automation] build machine tools, so we want to be able to do the most difficult racing in the world, because making machine tools is also a very difficult business to be in,” Haas said speaking to web site Grand Prix 247, at the recent launch of the new Haas Factory Outlet in Portugal.
“We have a NASCAR team that is racing over ten years now, and we’ve been successful. We won two championships. We understand racing and we are approaching racing from a different point a view from our predecessors,” he said.
“We are looking at it from the racing standpoint. We are at the track to compete, and to achieve that we looked for the most efficient way to do it. I won’t say that we are going to compete with Mercedes and Ferrari, but we will be prepared,” he added.
It will be very interesting to see if Haas can make a new idea work, especially when so many new teams have faltered in the past. However, if this does work, it will set the standards for smaller teams that enter this sport in the future, an opportunity to follow a successful business approach.