Gene Haas, F1’s newest team owner, has admitted to keeping a sharp eye on the turmoil at Maranello.<\/p>\n
This year, after securing a place on the 2016 grid, Nascar co-owner Haas agreed a deal with Ferrari to receive customer engines and “all related technical services”.<\/p>\n
Haas Automation, Haas’ leading machine tool company, also became an on-car sponsor of the fabled Italian team.<\/p>\n
But since the agreements were made, it has been all change at Ferrari as the marque reacted to its poor start to the all-new ‘power unit’ era.<\/p>\n
President Luca di Montezemolo and team boss Marco Mattiacci, for example, have gone, which may be a concern to Haas.<\/p>\n
“That’s a good point,” Haas admitted to Sports Business Daily.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know.\u00a0 I think that the higher-ups know what they’re doing.\u00a0 I hope we didn’t have any influence over them losing their jobs.”<\/p>\n
The interviewer, Leigh Diffey, admitted that over lunch Haas confessed that “whoever I spoke to (at Ferrari) got fired.\u00a0 I better stop speaking to people.”<\/p>\n
Haas commented: “There’s a lot of pressure on Ferrari.\u00a0 Ferrari is obviously a marquee car builder, and formula one is their marquee racing series.\u00a0 And they want to win.<\/p>\n
“There’s just a lot of pressure there.\u00a0 I have to respect that.”<\/p>\n
There is also big pressure on Haas, who are building a modest team from scratch and intending to be the only competitor without its main headquarters in Europe.<\/p>\n
And Haas’ building phase also coincides with a period of great turmoil in formula one, with backmarkers Marussia and Caterham going out of business and other small teams struggling for survival.<\/p>\n
“There are a lot of pitfalls in formula one,” he admitted.<\/p>\n
“We’ve seen a lot of teams have a lot of problems.\u00a0 There are money issues.<\/p>\n
“There’s a lot of rancour in the troops out there as far as what we’re hearing.\u00a0 I look at it as a challenge.\u00a0 I’ve been to some formula one races.\u00a0 I’ve met the people.\u00a0 I like them.\u00a0 They’re good people.”<\/p>\n
But Haas also admitted that the task of building a car, even for 2016, is almost “overwhelming”.<\/p>\n
“If you get it wrong,” he said, “it’s a disaster.”<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gene Haas, F1’s newest team owner, has admitted to keeping a sharp eye on the turmoil at Maranello. This year, after securing a place on the 2016 grid, Nascar co-owner Haas agreed a deal with Ferrari to receive customer engines and “all related technical services”. Haas Automation, Haas’ leading machine tool company, also became an …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25410,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[5262,93,5340,4754,148,1335],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25981"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25981"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25982,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25981\/revisions\/25982"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}