Haas unlikely to stay in Formula 1 if results don’t improve in 2020, team owner Gene Haas says.
Last season saw the American outfit slump to ninth in the Constructors’ standings after struggling with race pace for much of the season.
Certainly, that was not in the plan of Haas, who joined the grid in 2016 and have found themselves stuck in the midfield fight ever since.
“I’m just kind of waiting to see how this season starts off,” he told Motorsport at a NASCAR event in Fontana last weekend.
“If we have another bad year, then it would not be that favourable [to stay].
“We did five years. That was really the test – we’re going to do this for five years, see how it goes and evaluate it and then we’ll decide whether to go forward.
“I’m not saying we won’t be back. It has to be evaluated. To do it for another five years, though, that would be a big commitment.”
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Haas’ arrival in F1 did contribute to gaining support in America, something the sport has always struggled to do versus NASCAR and IndyCar, and the benefits have been reciprocal.
“It’s helped quite a bit,” he said about the business impact. “It gave us a lot of recognition in the European market and also a lot of the Asian markets.
“We’ve brought a lot of customers to the races. It’s all worked out well. But with the new regulations coming in 2021, the big question is how much is that going to cost,” Gene added.
“There’s so much change going on in Formula 1, you really have to ask yourself is it really going to be worth the expense to try to implement all these changes? I know everyone thinks the changes are good, but – boy – they’re expensive.”
And though it is expected a new budget cap of $175m will help teams like Haas, he claims that won’t happen in his case because of the revenue inequality
“It’s definitely not financially worth it, I can tell you that,” he said on if the performance on track repaid the high investment.
“The business model does not favour the smaller teams. As everybody knows with the way the money has been distributed 70 per cent of it goes to the top three teams and 30 per cent of it goes to the other seven teams. It’s not a good economic model.
“At least in our condition, you’re only paid about a third of what it actually costs to run a team in Formula 1. So, from a business model, it doesn’t do that well.
“Obviously, every team has a different nature as to why they do it. Some of it is primary sponsorship. Ferrari is that they’ve been doing it for 60 years.
“But they take home enough money to actually make the $175 million cap, but a lot of the other teams operate on a quarter of that. So, how can you really run a race team with that kind of disparity?”
And as for his expectations for 2020, Haas admits the team face a tough challenge in a very competitive environment.
“Our car certainly wasn’t the fastest out there,” he said about testing. “We were midfield. Several years ago, the midfield was like five seconds apart.
“This year they were about two seconds from each other, maybe even closer than that. I think really the only good news was that we weren’t really that much slower than the Ferraris, but the Ferraris weren’t at the top of the scoreboards every day, either.
“It’s just a challenge. It’s a difficult sport. It’s extremely expensive. It’s time-consuming and it puts a huge amount of stress on the teams to compete. It’s not really beneficial to the teams that aren’t in the top four or five.”
