Gene Haas didn’t take Bernie Ecclestone’s advice
Gene Haas wanted to create his own F1 team from scratch, whereas Bernie Ecclestone had advised him to simply buy an existing team. This choice has important financial consequences.
Since the wave of arrivals in 2010, with Marussia, Caterham, and HRT, no team had been created from scratch. Yet that is the choice Gene Haas made, fully aware of the consequences.
He thus told Autosport that Bernie Ecclestone had strongly advised him not to do everything alone but to rely on an existing base: « Bernie was constantly saying, “Why don’t you just buy an existing team?” It would have been a better idea since at the time, there were only ten teams. So economically, it would have been much more advantageous. Bernie was probably right because there are so many benefits to being a top 10 team. »
Indeed, such a position proves to be very valuable as it not only opens the door to monetary payments from the FOM but also covers all transportation costs for the equipment and personnel of the concerned teams. With a schedule of 21 races across four continents, this expense clearly represents a significant budget.
Furthermore, the American businessman will have to wait at least until the 2018 season to receive payments from the FOM since the Concorde Agreements stipulate that a team must be in the top 10 at least two seasons out of three to benefit from it. For reference, Manor, which ranked 10th in 2015, received this year a sum of 41 million euros as a performance bonus.
In these conditions, the decision to focus early on the 2017 season and its numerous regulatory changes appears all the more logical: “We have added some appendages to the front wing and made some changes at the back, but I think we are done with the 2016 car. We are trying to move on to the 2017 one because of all the changes we need to make. I think we will be better next year than this year. We will continue to develop.”
The team will also be able to benefit from this year of learning to better understand all the elements that Ferrari provides without necessarily a lot of explanations due to the constraints imposed by the FIA: « *With Ferrari, they provide us with a lot of parts but they do not necessarily provide us with the information on how they work. In the end, it’s a matter of employees. We have almost started from scratch and we had so much to learn by ourselves. Over time, we need our employees to really understand how the cars work. We cannot go to Ferrari and ask them: “How does this work?” We have to understand it by ourselves.* »
The founder of the eponymous group is therefore in F1 for the long term as he wants to use it as a lever for his core business, Haas Automation.
With the participation of www.racingbusiness.fr
