Guenther Steiner, Haas, 2018

Haas: “Desperate” Renault shouldn’t be fighting us for fourth

2018 F1 season

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Haas team principal Guenther Steiner says Renault’s Italian Grand Prix protest shows they are “desperate” to end the season ahead of their much smaller rival.

Last week the FIA dismissed an appeal by Haas against the decision by the Italian Grand Prix stewards to disqualify him from sixth place at Monza. His exclusion came about after Renault protested the team’s car, driven by Romain Grosjean.

The verdict means Haas are unlikely to overhaul Renault for fourth place in the constructors’ championship, as the two are now separated by 30 points. But Steiner believes they can still take satisfaction from what is set to be their best-ever championship position.

“We are in our third season. We are fifth. We’re fighting with Renault which they should be a lot better anyway. I think it shows how desperate they are because they are a works team, they have five times as many people as us, and they are fighting with us. For us it’s an honour.

“What can you say? I would ask them how they feel about it. It’s all part of it. We know F1 is a very difficult place to race. It’s not everything about racing. But I think our team is doing a good job and that is why we are fighting for fourth. It’s very difficult now at this moment in time but maybe miracles happen.”

The full reasoning for the decision taken by the FIA International Court of Appeal has not been published yet. But Steiner says the team will learn from Grosjean’s disqualification.

“I think you always learn [from] any situation in life and that is the good thing in life, you’ve got the opportunity to learn. Next time we’ll do it different to make sure what we do stands up in front of everything. We move on, we are not dwelling on it, we are done and dusted, go racing again.”

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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22 comments on “Haas: “Desperate” Renault shouldn’t be fighting us for fourth”

  1. If there is one thing that Steiner might lern from this, it is that deciding to race a car after being warned by the FIA that, if they did not modify it, it would be open to protest and declared illegal, deciding to take a chance and run the car in an illegal configuration anyway isn’t the most sensible idea.

  2. Well, seen as a very large team of Ferrari personnel designed that Haas, he should probably reassess those figures.

  3. LOL… seriously. If the appeal went their way, maybe there would be valid reasons to say such thing. But it didn’t, it was ruled they raced an illegal car, and then it was confirmed after the appeal. So it’s only fair that Renault protested, and other teams should be pleased about the decision too. Even more so given that the team was warned beforehand.

    And besides, if their drivers had not made so many mistakes during the season, they’d be ahead of Renault anyway. The car was faster than the results they got, specially at the beginning of the season.

  4. Sour grapes, rules are rules.

  5. I want to like Haas, but I really dislike the attitude of their 2 drivers and Steiner is just as abrasive. Shame.

  6. Jizzus Christ, there’s really no shortage of irritating, immature, annoying, despicable people in F1.

  7. Agree with steiner, they’re doing a very good job with 100 odd millions of budget and being at their 3rd year fighting with renault who is a works team, has 2x budget currently and won titles in the past.

    As for their battle, it’s over, 30 points behind, but I think the race where they threw away by themselves the chance to fight for it is australia, the first: both haas drivers were unusually driving very well (normally it’s one of the 2) and they fitted tyres wrongly on both cars, causing their retirement, and I think they were on course for 5th and 6th place, seeing as alonso managed to hold off verstappen, and he was further back, and those are a massive 18 points lost, and renault scored 7 points in that race, which would’ve only been 2 if it weren’t for haas mistake, so 23 points swing in that race!

    They’d only be 7 points behind now, certainly it’s not easy to score many points if no top team driver retires, you only have max 10 points per race, but provided they were faster than renault in these 2 races they could have.

    Anyway renault seems really pathetic, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for how the 2019 car comes out, but if it isn’t massively better in relation to the field it’s a disaster, they’re only losing ground to the top teams recently.

  8. I’m so bored and irritated by this person’s constant whining. This is something he really needs to learn about.
    And, if it hadn’t been for Force India’s situation neither of them would be looking at 4th place…!
    If this guy has any say in driver selection it’s no surprise Haas are retaining the services of two other Great Whiners… :-)
    Haapies For Ever…!

  9. Move on, man. You’re like the friend who, once drunk, keeps moaning about the girl who dumped him years ago.

    Teams compete with those closest to them, that’s a simple fact. It is irrelevant whether Renault has three times your budget; if they’re competing with Haas or Force India on points, they will do all that’s needed to beat them. Yes, Renault themselves might privately admit it’s not the greatest thing to be fighting with a privateer when the other manufacturers are way ahead, but at the end of the day, constructor points are money.

    1. Thanks for saying it so well @phylyp, being able to move on is a great feat.

  10. Haas would do the same to renault if they had a chance.

  11. What a cry baby this Steiner is. You cheated, your rival protested, and you got disqualified. Learn from your mistakes and move on with your life. Haas launched a shady protest to prevent Force India from getting it’s payments after the name change, and they have the nerve to complain about this kind of nonsense.

    We are in our third season. We are fifth. We’re fighting with Renault which they should be a lot better anyway. I think it shows how desperate they are because they are a works team, they have five times as many people as us, and they are fighting with us. For us it’s an honour.

    Really now? The only reason Haas are even competing in the midfield is because they raced last year’s Ferrari chassis. They are a clueless little unit that can’t even attend in-season tests because they don’t understand their chassis, or know how to develop it. Of course Renault have 5 times the number of people, they don’t outsource every function under the sun to third parties. Renault actually design and develop their own car, which involves a lot of human resources… but obviously Haas wouldn’t know anything about that. They count on Ferrari’s R&D to make themselves more competitive. Where’s the ‘Honour’ in that?

    Maybe Steiner should outsource his statements to the media to a proper PR agency.

  12. First, a few weeks after RoGro’s disqualification and when Renault were struggling, Guenther said that they should try to improve their on-track performance before using off-track tactics, and now that his team having been outperformed for two races in a row, he is saying that Renault should be fighting higher up the grid. 😂😂😂

    1. LOL, nicely spotted :-) @neutronstar

      1. @phylyp thanks, but I want to flag my comment for subpar english.

    2. Heh, good point @neutronstar, missed that little sequence before; starts to become a pattern before long.

  13. Whether they’re desperate or not, they definitely will be finishing ahead of Haas. There’s 30pts in it with 2 races to go. Well done to Haas and all that, but less of the lip.

  14. Anyone else starting to really dislike the whole HAAS team? Steiner, MAG and GRO…
    Also I did a quick search about Steiner’s statement that Renault has “5x more people” working for them. Renault plans to have 700 employees by the end of the year, so you’re telling me HAAS is run by 140 people? That’s very impressive.

    1. HAAS is run by 140 people

      @francorchamps17 – I’m not one that supports the notion that the 2018 Haas is a 2017 Ferrari with a new paint job.

      That said, as others have pointed out, Renault has the PU staff, and people to create all the ancillaries/listed parts, in addition to the rest of the team. Haas’ head count does not include the people they’ve saved by using legal listed parts, nor would it count the Dallara team.

      So, yes, Renault would have more people involved than Haas, but that is an apples to oranges comparison, simply because Haas does a subset of the work that a works team does.

      Haas do deserve admiration for the way they came into F1 and succeeded by rapidly moving into the midfield (instead of languishing at the tail, like the entrants at the turn of the last decade), and they would be more likeable if they could just dial down the complaints a bit.

    2. @francorchamps17, it is difficult to tell how many people Haas employ in their team due to the way that the team is set up, since we’re only really seeing a record of the more senior management positions in their publicly listed accounts.

      Like a number of other teams, they have a holding company that employs a small number of people which is officially responsible for items such as logistics, trackside operations and so forth, as well as employing the most senior members of the team. However, a number of the designers are employed by subsidiary companies and aren’t listed in the headcount figures for the parent company, or staff who are seconded in to the F1 team from other parts of Haas’s wider company.

      I suspect that Steiner is exaggerating the difference with his comments, as in 2017 the estimated head count was in the order of 210 people – now, as phylyp notes, since Haas outsource much of their work, their growth rate will be slower, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they have added a few more staff since then (say, in the order of 215-220 people now).

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