While most of the Formula 1 world celebrates the return to sparkling form for the Haas F1 Team, their rivals apparently sharpening their knives starting with some choice questions concerning their new-found performance.
This, of course, remembering how pitiful the American team was last year, but 2022 has been a revelation and renaissance. Since they ditched Nikita Mazepin on the eve of the new season, veteran Kevin Magnussen returned to partner Mick Schumacher and immediately, despite no testing in the Haas VF22, finished fifth at the F1 season opener in Bahrain.
Notably, Haas and Ferrari have had strong ties since Gene Haas began his F1 adventure; from wind tunnel sharing through to the use of so-called ‘transferable parts’ as well as their Power Unit (which they pay for) and gearboxes as well as to staff moving to the team from Maranello.
Nevertheless, it has been a massive turnaround for the minnows of the current F1 grid, which of course prompted scrutiny from their rivals in the F1 paddock.
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff, whose team is not the powerhouse this year that it has been for most of the past decade, observed: “Haas has made a huge jump from being last into being solidly into Q3 in Bahrain. So that’s an interesting step.
“For us, it’s a learning exercise because an organisation we have 1000 people and we’ve been successful in the past. Suddenly, you’re fighting a team that’s much smaller in size, so they must have done a super job.”
Wolff is wary of the Haas-Ferrari partnership
The Mercedes team boss suggesting tweaks to the model: “I think it needs to reform because we want to avoid the kind of discussions that we have had from the last few weeks. Everybody deserves to perform well and people should get credit when they have done a good job.
“But some of the job-hopping, or entity-hopping, on the same premises is just creating arguments that are not necessary for the sport. We have Aston Martin in the windtunnel that, two years ago, we had quite a storm about. We have been handling that with the utmost diligence.
“But going forward, if we were to need to compromise our income ability, we need to do this because none of the teams should be able to cooperate in a way that we’re seeing with some,” reckoned Wolff.
Mercedes are not the only team scrutinising the big steps Haas have taken and how it was achieved. Alpine boss Szafnauer also weighed into the discussion: “It’s a small team that’s done well over the winter from last to sometimes third fastest team.
“I thought that the pecking order would stay almost the same because, over the years that I’ve been in Formula 1, the bigger the regulation change, the more it favors those with know-how and the infrastructure and the tools to exploit the new rules.
“So it’s a bit surprising that Haas are where they are for a small team. But I trust the FIA will investigate and come to the right conclusion between how similar the two cars are. In an ideal world, the rules are pretty clear and the difficulty is policing. So if the policing of the rules is impossible, then we should change the rules so that they are able to be policed such that the playing field is even.
“There’s more discussion to be had with the FIA and perhaps a bit of reform on the rules such that they can be policed,” added Szafnauer.
Seidl: It makes B-teams overly competitive compared to teams like us
McLaren team boss Andreas Seidl also voiced his concerns: “In Formula 1, the maximum that you should be allowed to share is the power unit and the gearbox internals. There should be no sharing of any infrastructure and so on because if you allow that, IP transfer is happening on the car side.
“We know from the FIA that it’s difficult to police, and if something is not possible to police then you need to ban it. It makes B-teams overly competitive compared to teams like us and at the same time the A-teams are also benefitting, which is even more worrying for us.
“We just hope with all the dialogue that is happening with F1 and several teams that we finally see some action in the next years in order to correct this situation,” added Seidl.
Red Bull and AlphaTauri also share close cooperation which the latter’s team principal Franz Tost claims is a genuine cost-saving exercise in the year of the $140-million budget cap: “It’s a good way to work together with another team. In the past, for example, we designed our gearbox, we had our own windtunnel and this is a waste of money.
“To go in the direction that every team now has to have its own windtunnel — It’s an absolute waste of money and also not balanced with sustainability.
“We 100% respect the rules. We share a windtunnel with Red Bull Technology, but there is absolutely no exchange of technical information. Nothing,” insisted Tost.
As it stands, the FIA have not acted on the Haas-Ferrari connection, even when it blew up in 2016 when the American team entered the sport at the highest level, and for now they seem satisfied with the existing modus operandi of the two teams.
However, the more successful Haas and their drivers are this season – and all signs are they have a handy car on the three vastly different tracks experienced so far – expect more questions from their rivals.