Haas chief Guenther Steiner accepts Formula 1 must avoid moving towards “GP1” with standardisation but is unsure of the alternatives.
Currently, F1 teams, the FIA and Liberty Media are in the final stages of agreeing on the final regulations for 2021 with cost-saving through incorporating some standard parts one of their main proposals.
However, already plans have been delayed to standardise brake systems and some parts of the gearbox and the Haas boss knows there is a fine line to be followed.
“I always think we shouldn’t go down the GP1 way because that is not in the DNA of Formula 1,” Steiner said, referencing the near-identical cars used in GP2 and GP3, the predecessors to the current F2 and F3.
“Formula 1 lives off technology although at some stage, we go out of control, it’s like everything. If you let too much freedom, it’s just getting [to the point where] nobody can afford it anymore and there [is] where we are now.
“The budget cap should do a lot to help that one, but we cannot restrict it – that is not very constructive,” he added. “We need to find a middle ground.”
The biggest critics of the plan have been the manufacturers who are instead supporting an alternative ‘open-source’ system where designs of some parts are made available for other teams to copy.
However, given the criticism Haas themselves have faced from sharing a similar approach with Ferrari, Steiner can’t help but see the irony.
“Yeah. I think there’s a lot of inconsistency of what people think,” he admitted. “It’s like one day they think this; it’s all done in the moment of what suits you, in my opinion.
“That’s why I was always very relaxed about these things – it’s like, ‘Guys, we cannot just react to somebody performing better than somebody else and then try to hinder him and then open [it] up’.
“Because then if everybody uses the open-source parts and someone says, ‘I cannot afford them so we should take open-source parts away’ – at some stage we can make another 20 categories how to make these parts and confuse everybody.
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“I think we are confusing ourselves. We try to find a fix for it, but with each fix we create two more problems, then we create two more fixes and have four more problems,” the Haas chief suggested.
“At some stage, we don’t know anymore what to check and what is what.
“Trying to explain this to people, how to do this, how this sport is done, it’s getting quite difficult because sometimes I need to read all these abbreviations three or four times until I remember them.”