Why Haas said farewell to its founding father – and ‘DTS darling’

Guenther Steiner’s plainspoken and self-deprecating manner, punctuated by the odd profane outburst in moments of frustration, made him a breakout star of Netflix’s hit F1 series Drive to Survive.

For a team which tended to compete in the lower half of the midfield, Steiner enjoyed a profile closer more like those at the helm of F1’s best-known and most competitive outfits, such as Red Bull’s Christian Horner or Mercedes’ Toto Wolff.

Now, eight years after Steiner brought F1’s newest team into the championship, Haas has decided he is no longer the person to take them forward.

Steiner is the latest in a series of team principals to find himself moved aside for performance reasons. Similar changes have taken place at Alpine and Ferrari within the last 12 months.

But Steiner’s position at Haas was different to those other bosses as he had done so much to bring the team into F1 to begin with. He had sounded out Ferrari to serve as a supplier of engines and other vital parts, and sold Gene Haas on the plan. His connections within F1 helped smooth the entry of the most recent new team to arrive in the sport – a difficult process to navigate, as Andretti is presently discovering.

Haas also enjoyed a remarkably successful start to life in F1 for a new team. The Ferrari deal Steiner masterminded deserved much of the credit for that. Rival teams variously emulated the approach or pressed for rules changes to the advantage Haas had gained.

The clamour over Haas’ performance was loudest when they turned up in F1 and scored sixth on their debut, courtesy of Romain Grosjean in Melbourne, then went one place better at the next race in Bahrain. They finished eighth in the championships over the first two seasons, then rose to fifth in 2018 (gaining one place as a result of Force India’s mid-season change of owner and identity).

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Things began to go awry for Haas in 2019 when it was perplexed by an ill-behaving car and distracted by a public row with its new title sponsor. This was the year the Netflix cameras captured Steiner’s notorious ‘fok smash my door’ remark at Silverstone, and the lengthy telephone debriefs with Gene Haas about the team’s latest setbacks.

Haas was therefore in a vulnerable position when the Covid-19 pandemic struck the following year. The team only avoided sinking to last in the standings by three points and Steiner admitted…