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F1: Grosjean Signs With Haas’ F1 Team For 2016

By Mark Gero

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Nov 2, 2014; Austin, TX, USA; Lotus driver Romain Grosjean (L) of France enters the paddock prior to the 2014 U.S. Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas. Mandatory Credit: Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports

After a long wait from the F1 media and curious fans waiting for something to happen, the Haas F1 team selected Tuesday morning Frenchman Romain Grosjean to be the first driver to join the American team for their rookie season in 2016.

Grosjean, along with Team Manager Guenther Steiner and owner Gene Haas took questions in their Kannapolis, North Carolina building that attracted some reporters from the U.S. and around the world.

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After serving with ING Renault and Lotus F1, Grosjean felt that now would be the time to change things, especially since Haas has connections to Ferrari and a good result next season could springboard him to the Scuderia in 2017, but only if Kimi Raikkonen leaves the team.

“Well, I think, as I say, I took my decision before – there was not decision A and decision B.” said Grosjean. “I’ve met Guenther, I’ve met Gene. We spoke. They explained to me what was the project like, and I believe that it’s a new approach going on in Formula One and an approach that’s going to work. I’ve spent 10 years, and I know the guys very well, and it would have been easy to take the comfortable road and stay there. But, on the other hand, I want to try to win races, win championships, and I thought that coming here to Haas was a good step in a good direction to achieve that.”

Haas was very pleased with the selection of Grosjean and hopes that the Frenchman can contribute to the team with some victories and good placings in their first season.

“I think some of the other qualities would be just the maturity of experience.” Haas explained. “You know, there’s always theory and then there’s actual experience. I think when you start out as a racecar driver, you have a tendency to be a bit aggressive so, hopefully with Romain, his maturity will lend itself towards us being able to progress as a team.

I think other areas, too, is that he’s a bright young person, so I think he’s going to help a lot as far as promoting our machine tool brand in Europe. I mean, obviously he’s French‑Swiss nationality, so those are both very important countries to our business. So we’ll be looking forward to him representing our products over there.

I’m sure that will open up marketing opportunities both here in the U.S. and Europe.”

Steiner on the other hand, has had experience in being a team manager, and is very much in agreement with his boss that they selected someone that they really wanted that fill the gap and satisfied in what they were looking for.

“As Gene said before, you know, we looked around a lot to find the right guy because we wanted somebody with experience but still hungry to do something, to go with us this long way.” Stated Steiner. “I mean, I started talks with the management of Romain in Barcelona to see if he’s interested and, you know, we spoke to quite a few drivers, and in the end I spoke also with technical people, what they think about Romain, how he develops a car, because we have got a steep mountain to climb here, new team, all new team members, so we needed somebody who knows what he’s doing.

I think in the end we found the right guy because he has so much ‘want to drive’ now, and he’s still aggressive or still wants it, you know, but he’s not young (so) anymore that he’s inexperienced. We lose time by having accidents or doing rookie mistakes.

I think we just picked the best one out there for what we are doing, and we focused on him and got him, and we are very happy and we are looking forward to working with him.”

Grosjean himself has had plenty of incidents during his racing career. But now, he has put himself together and will open his debut with the team in March next year at the Circuit de Catalunya in Spain with his first pre-season test.

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