Haas team principal Gunther Steiner has highlighted the team’s need to expand it’s workforce in order to climb to the upper echelons of Formula 1’s competitive order.
Haas, who first entered the sport back in 2016, is F1’s newest team and with less than 200 employees, is also one of the sport’s smallest outfits.
When asked what the team needed to do in order to improve their pecking order position in 2018, Steiner suggested that expanding the workforce would be key.
“It’s not like there’s one void [to fill] to grow the team,” he said. “We are still very small, I think the smallest one, we have got not more than 200 people at the moment.
“We need to strengthen it everywhere. That’s what we are doing. We are now already looking for people for next year because it takes quite a long time to get good people, but we will increase again by 10 or 15 per cent.
“It’s nothing compared with the big teams, how they grow – but that is what we are doing and that is what we want to continue to do.”
Increasing personnel numbers also means increasing financial commitment. Intriguingly, Steiner’s comments come just two weeks after team owner Gene Haas expressed his disillusionment with how F1’s elite three teams command a near unassailable advantage over the midfield.
“They are the teams that develop their own engines, transmissions and chassis, so there’s an inherent advantage in doing that,” Haas stated.
“How do we overcome that? Quite frankly there’s no answer to that, which is really depressing.”
Steiner’s comments regarding the team’s expansion plans serve to diffuse speculation that Haas is losing interest in the sport, despite his own rather bleak statement.
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