Günther Steiner had already mentioned earlier this year that his departure from Haas F1 had been a little too late. The Italian, who created the project and led the team from its beginnings until the end of 2023, confirmed that he should not have stayed so long, but that he did not have enough perspective to leave.
“I should have left earlier.” he told Mirror Sport. “I was in a tough fight where I had no chance of winning. We started, we had nothing. We worked to be respected in F1. We achieved a lot.”
“But after the end of Covid, there was no more dynamic. We were going in circles. It was a bit of the same thing. I want to succeed. And what is success? Getting on the podium, try to win, at least have a good chance of getting on the podium.”
“But if you say to yourself ‘that’s not possible with the way we work, the best we can hope for is to get a sixth place or, in a fantastic year, a fifth place’… that’s what I did, we made it into a t-shirt. But when you’re in the trenches, you don’t realize it anymore. But when you come out, you wonder if you should have. leave before. The answer is yes.”
“When you’re in the trenches, you forget”
Steiner explains why he had a hard time realizing his departure was necessary: “It wasn’t possible. When you’re on the field, you always try to do your best for the team. But I’ve come a long way, I’ll be 60 next year, and I kept fight for the same thing.”
“You work day and night, you put all your energy and you do your best, but you only fail. You can’t win because the limits are there. You have limits, because if you look at the other teams, I mean they have better facilities, they have more money to spend on development.”
“It’s all there, and I don’t think I’m smarter than them, because they are very smart people. If I’m as smart as them, I’m already proud, already happy. I don’t need more, and that’s what you have to understand. You have to look in the mirror. How can I do this?
“But when you’re in the trenches, you forget all that, because you continue to work. But when you come out, you say to yourself that maybe it would have been better to leave, I don’t know, in the middle of the year 2022, telling myself that it wasn’t going to work and that I had to do something different.”
“There was no respect towards me”
After his adventure at Haas, Steiner still launched legal proceedings against the team for shortcomings in his salary, and he is annoyed by the treatment reserved for him: “I don’t regret it. I think it wouldn’t have been necessary, you know? It could have been done completely differently.”
“There’s been no respect for me, to be honest. I even have to fight for my money. You build something like that, and I think for what was put in and what came out, It’s a pretty good return on investment.”
“But am I upset? No. There are a lot of positive things in the world. I mean, why would I lose sleep over it? I’m doing the right thing and trying to get what I I don’t care about Gene Haas, just like I don’t care about a billion other people I don’t know.
“The last thing I want is to talk to him. I don’t need him. I’m fine, I feel pretty happy and I’m in a good situation. I know I have a lot of friends , I have a good family, I don’t talk to Gene Haas and I don’t really care.”
In his latest book ‘Sans Filter’, to be published in France by Talent Sport, he also tells a story to show how much Gene Haas wanted to reduce costs within the team.
He explains that he had to bring back on a plane flight a dish of beans that had been served during a race weekend, and that he and other team members did not want to eat. Gene Haas then ordered them to be brought back to the factory to be eaten by the employees.
“When I told the story to my writer, he said to me “you’re kidding, that’s not possible! I told him yes, and that’s what I experienced for ten years!” a conclu Steiner.
