Haas Team Principal Guenther Steiner remains optimistic ahead of the 2024 Formula 1 season, believing his team “could end up top of the midfield” in 2024.
Having sacrificed development during the 2021 season to hit the ground running when F1’s ground effect era ushered in for the 2022 season, Haas has found itself at the bottom of the standings after just the second year of the current ruleset.
The American outfit had started strong, with Nico Hulkenberg in particular putting in several strong qualifying performances that helped the squad pick up points despite a lack of race pace and poor tyre management.
But the team’s struggles in race conditions worsened throughout the year and with gains being made by other teams, Haas found itself last in the Constructors’ standings, where it would remain by the end of the season, but Steiner is still hopeful of a turnaround in 2024.
“With the budget cap in place now, everything is possible,” Steiner told Sky Sports F1.
“AlphaTauri end of the season, McLaren beginning of the season, they didn’t start strong then at some stage they were the second fastest car out there, more than once.
“Everything is possible.
“The big teams is always the big teams, for the next three to five years they will be always at the front, but the midfield…
“I don’t think there is top teams, midfield and backmarkers anymore.
“There is top teams and the rest in my opinion now because everybody is in a good place financially as a business [and] technically.
“We ended up last this year but we could end up in the top mid-field next year.”
Whilst Steiner remains confident Haas could navigate a tightly packed midfield to emerge higher up in the pecking order, the way 2023 panned out for the team should be cause for concern.
The Haas Team Principal cited McLaren’s and AlphaTauri’s mid-season turnarounds as reasons for why Haas could do the same, but this year’s campaign suggests the American outfit has already failed in this regard.
Both McLaren and AlphaTauri were able to identify their respective weaknesses and implement upgrade packages that improved performance.
For McLaren, identifying that the team had made the wrong approach to development in the winter of 2022 gave the Woking-based outfit ample time to introduce a heavily updated MCL60 in Austria, resulting in several podium finishes and a fourth-place finish in the Constructors’ standings by the end of 2023.
Similarly, AlphaTauri’s decision to opt for a Red Bull-inspired design philosophy in Singapore helped it overhaul both Haas and Alfa Romeo to finish the year in eighth.
Haas meanwhile, had hoped for a similar improvement with a Red Bull-inspired car upgrade at Austin, Texas, but this wasn’t to be the case.
The team’s hopes of finishing higher than last in the standings didn’t come to pass as the upgraded VF-23 did little to improve the team’s overall performance.
For Haas to emerge as midfield front-runner in 2024, Steiner will need to rely on more than just a tightly contested pack to make progress.
