04/03/2020
NEWS STORY
If, as many fear, Gene Haas decides to pull the plug on his F1 adventure later this year, it will be difficult to discern when exactly he made the decision.
Will it have been his team's disastrous 2019 season, the Rich Energy fiasco, the sheer cost (despite the impending budget cap) or the feeling that despite next year's rules overhaul it will remain a question of the big three and Formula B, Gene Haas's own description of those teams outside the Mercedes/Ferrari/Red Bull bubble.
Following the high of 2018, when the American team was unlucky not to claim fourth from Renault, it was back to earth with a bang a year later. Following a promising season opener – at least for Kevin Magnussen - things rapidly began to fall apart, the biggest points haul coming in the lottery that was Hockenheim.
Disappointing in pre-season testing, Gene Haas admits that the early phase of the coming season will influence whether he decides to remain in F1 or move on.
"I'm kind of waiting to see how this season starts off," he tells Motorsport.com. "If we have another bad year, then it would not be that favourable.
"We did five years," he continues. "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," he insists. "It has to be evaluated. But to do it for another five years, though, that would be a big commitment."
Rich Energy branding aside, Haas used his F1 team to promote his CNC machine tool business, and in that respect the project has been a success.
"It's helped quite a bit," he says, "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..." he adds, "with the new regulations coming in 2021, the big question is how much is that going to cost? 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.
"It's similar to what is going on here," he continues, referring to NASCAR. "The Gen 7 is a real departure from what has done in the past. It's like anything else, they've changed so many aspects of the car, you just know there's going to be a lot of troubleshooting to get it right. It's difficult for the teams.
"These changes that they implement, I think they do it with the best of intentions but when you are on the other side of the equation trying to implement them, economically it's extremely difficult."
Asked if the return is worth the huge investment, the American is in no doubt. "It's definitely not financially worth it," he says, "I can tell you that.
"The business model does not favour the smaller teams. As everybody knows with the way the money has been distributed 70 percent of it goes to the top three teams and 30 percent 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?"
Referring to last week's test and the coming season, he says: "Our car certainly wasn't the fastest out there, we were midfield.
"Several years ago, the midfield was like five seconds apart," he continues. "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," he admits. "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."