Gene Haas has revealed that he turned down interest from a consortium of investors which have since partnered with the Alpine Formula 1 team in a deal worth $200 million.
In June, it was announced that Otro Capital had acquired a 24% stake in Alpine Racing Limited, tipping the team’s valuation over the €800 million mark.
Otro’s investment was supported by RedBird Capital Partners and Maximum Effort Investments, the latter led by Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds who welcomed onboard fellow Wrexham Football Club co-owner and actor Rob McElhenney.
With a series of A-Listers and sporting superstars also behind the consortium, Alpine views the investment as ‘essential to support our sporting performance over the long term’ with incremental revenue to be reinvested into the team in turn.
Following the news of Gunther Steiner’s dismissal as Haas team principal, the outfit’s owner and namesake Gene Haas told Formula 1’s official website that he had dismissed interest from Alpine’s eventual investors after being unimpressed by their proposal.
“We have had outside investors come in, and they wanted to talk to us,” Haas said.
“They expect a 15% rate of return every year. Give me a 15% rate of return and I have a couple of hundred million dollars I’ll give you! They have high expectations, they have all kinds of rules.
“What their job is, they want to buy into you, and five years later they want to make a $100m profit. Quite frankly, I don’t need that kind of oversight, from people who come in with $200m – it’s not enough to entice me to do that.”
Since joining the grid in 2016, Haas’ F1 project has struggled to take off leaving its CEO “embarrassed” that it hasn’t been able to meet performance expectations.
The team achieved its best Constructors’ Championship of fifth in 2018 but has since been unable to achieve higher than eighth, slipping to the bottom of the order in 2023 after being hampered by excessive tyre degradation and an aerodynamic package that reached a development ceiling.
Asked in the summer whether the former team principal believed that the team required further investment to become competitive, Steiner told Planet F1: “I think it’s not about money, it’s about a business model.
“If we want to keep with our business model and work with somebody, we don’t need to do this investment. If some people think they need to make the investment, it’s fine with me.”
Haas’ current business model sees the team take as many non-listed components from Ferrari as permitted by the sport’s regulations while the project is largely self-funded by Gene Haas’ tooling company Haas Automation.
“But there is more than one business model,” Steiner added. “We’re back to what we came up with in 2014 with this new business model, and we want to keep it at the moment.
“So we don’t need to make this investment. It’s not just about money in Formula 1, I think money sometimes is overrated – people think, if you invest 100 million, you can beat Mercedes.
“You can invest 100 million in your facilities and in your equipment, but then you still need the people, because the difference is the people. And running different business models is a people thing, it’s not an equipment thing. So I think there’s more than one way to do this and we’re doing it the way we want to do it.”
