Gene Haas: “We’re here to race and learn”

Is aero the most important area of the car for you?

Yes. Everybody will tell you that the place where you put your most effort is in aero. Pushing the car down is going to get you the best track increases in time. Then it comes down to suspension, and then it’s the engine package.

What is your goal for the first season?

Well, you know, I think our mid‑term expectation is to be able to show up at all the races. I’m expected to be within a couple of seconds of the leader, I don’t want to be five seconds behind him. If I can stay there for a while, I’ll be happy.

How can you minimise your learning curve in Formula 1?

We’re not here to prove that we can outthink the big teams. I mean, we cannot build better cars than Mercedes or Ferrari or Williams or Red Bull, these guys are the best in the world at what they do. So we’re looking at it from a standpoint, okay, we have to race these guys. What can we do that’s best?

The best thing for us to do is to have good equipment and hire the best drivers we can. Now we wanted to have an experienced Formula 1 driver simply for the fact we need someone that can tell us is our car any good? Is our set‑up right? We also need a driver that when we go to these different tracks is familiar with “here’s what we did last year”. I don’t want to talk to a driver that says “five years ago”.

We want to have an experienced driver, and that’s where Romain came in. Now he was in a different situation when he joined too. At the time, the Lotus team was on the verge of collapse, and now it’s been resuscitated. It wasn’t exactly what he thought, but now he’s taken a different career move.

Now as far as Esteban, he’s a Ferrari reserve driver, which gives him a lot of credibility as far as I’m concerned. Ferrari is very selective about who they put in that programme. So I feel comfortable about that, and he has current experience.

So how was the process of starting a Formula 1 team?

You know, like I’ve said before, it’s a learning experience. When we first started like a year and a half ago, we had nothing. We started working on the Kannapolis building, with the expectation that we were going to build everything there. It turns out in November of 2014, we took a flight, Guenther and I over to England and we were going to look at facilities, and it became apparent to us the old Banbury facility of the old Marussia team was available. Okay, what do you think? This thing’s ready to go, let’s just get this.

If you want to get a model built quickly, the people that can do that are Dallara which is about 100 miles north of us and they’ll get the model going really quick. So it’s kind of like you’re in a pinball machine – you just bounce off this, you bounce off that.

I can say that the car we have is going to be a very competitive car.

I know a lot of time has come into developing this car, especially on the aero side of it.  We’ve had the extra time to do the CFD, the wind tunnel examinations. We’ve spent a lot of time on the radiators getting those to work. Ferrari has given us a lot of data as far as heat rejections and inputs on how the new engine’s going to be.

Racing in the back is not one of our purposes.

How have American race fans viewed your entry into Formula 1?

Americans, at least a core group of them, want to see racing. I think people like it, whether it’s Indy Racing or drag racing or NASCAR racing or Formula 1. You’re going to have a certain portion of the population watching it, let’s just say it’s around 20%. Well, that’s still 70, 80 million viewers – that’s a hell of a number. I think that even tiny percentages are going to be beneficial to racing.

I’ve watched a lot of sports and to be honest with you, I find racing more exciting than say football and baseball. So I can’t imagine why Formula 1 wouldn’t be successful here if it’s put in the right formats and people understand what the teams are doing and all the controversy we’ve had in the last few years as far as Formula 1.

Racing has always been a big part of Haas Automation, hasn’t it?

Yeah, my CNC business manufacturing kind of started with racing. I used to machine a lot of race car parts. My first jobs in a machine shop were machining magnesium racing wheels for a company called LeGrand Race Cars out in North Hollywood.

So it’s just been part of my DNA and almost all of the competitors manufacture all these little wonderful widgets and aluminium billet parts that go on race cars. Hence to me, an integral part of racing is simply making things.




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