Green Notebook from The Wild Wood

This is the time of year when a lot of F1 people are flat out building new cars, crash-testing them and getting things ready for the new season. It is the time when folks start new jobs, but aside from a lot of action at the FIA (with the unsurprising departures of various key staff members, who seem not be in tune with the ways of the current President) and the sad task of obituary writing, things have been relatively quiet.

I have been spending my time doing off-season stuff. The first thing is usually getting sick for a while – which is usual when F1 travellers stop and relax. It is an environment which is pretty tough on the human body, but we all just keep going until we pause, then the germs spot the opportunity and come rushing in like sleazebags round supermodels.

It was interesting to note one change over the winter with Max Verstappen’s trainer Bradley Scanes deciding to leave F1 because of all the travelling involved. He is not the only one to be doing that. Max’s new trainer is a familiar figure, with the Verstappen clan having enlisted the help of Rupert Manwaring, the son of the former F1 team manager of the same name. Manwaring Jr has spent recent years working with Carlos Sainz Jr.

Anyway, suddenly it was the run-up to Christmas and there were small people to pass the time with, shops to spend money in, “stuff” to visit and things to be fixed around the house. Family things tend to get overlooked a little too much when the season is in full swing.

The biggest excitement (after realising that doing electrical DIY work is not THAT hard) was probably a trip to the Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace at Le Bourget, a wonderful collection of aviation history in the country where much of the early flying was done.

The museum is housed in the spectacular Art Deco terminal building of the old Paris airport, which first opened in 1937. The displays highlight the many links between the automobile world and aviation back in the early days when many of the early flyers were also car racers and when the first Salon International de l’Aeronautique (1908) was organised by the Automobile Club de France. The machines these madmen flew were insanely fragile, but cutting edge for the time…

Since then it has been a case of doing what The Badger does in Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, hanging out in the Wild Woods, with a first-rate fire burning in the hearth and not getting involved with the obsessive Mr Toads who inhabit the F1 world, crashing cars and creating a public nuisance. There are lots of people who the character of Toad of Toad Hall might have been based on, back when the book came out in 1908, but one can make a good case for Willy K Vanderbilt, an insanely wealthy but quite successful racing driver in the early years of the sport, who was forever running into trouble with his fancy new automobiles. These problems were such that he eventually decided to build his own private road from New York City to midway down Long Island and bought all the land required (as you do). This road ended up being 45 miles long and at the end of it, at Lake Ronkonkoma, he built a copy of the Petit Trianon from the Palais de Versailles, as an inn for the motorists to relax. It cost a lot to use his road, but the drivers could race down and back as the cops were not allowed to give chase.

When I go to Paris these days by car (which is rare as the city has an anti-car philosophy which makes visiting something of a nightmare) I sometimes pass through Carrières-sous-Poissy, which is today a bit of an industrial estate, but was once out in the country. It was on this road that the world’s motor race took place in 1894 and where Vanderbilt paid for a chateau to be built, complete with stables and a hippodrome. It was built there because it was close to the railway to Deauville, where Willy K owned a big stud farm called the Haras du Quesnay.

There is a sad twist to the tale because George Winthrop Sands, Willy K’s stepson, was killed in a road accident close to the chateau in the summer of 1908 driving a sporty De Dietrich at about 70 mph when something went wrong and he crashed into the row of trees beside the road. They say he had made a bet that he could get back from Deauville faster than the train…

Anyway, my wintry hibernation ended today with the astonishing news that Guenther Steiner is leaving Haas.

This is a real earthquake in the sport, and a huge surprise.

Haas is Steiner. The team was Guether’s idea and he found Gene Haas to support the project financially. That was 10 years ago. Haas Formula LLC was established in April 2014 and started racing in 2016. The idea was a clever one: to establish an F1 team that was based not on massive investment in infrastructure, but rather on  alliances and buying whatever was allowed within the rules at the time. A lot was. The regulations have since been tweaked to stop the same thing happening again and today the Haas cars are designed by the team’s own staff, admittedly based in the Ferrari campus in Maranello. They are not Ferrari employees, although many of them used to be. The cars are manufactured by Dallara and are fitted with Ferrari engines and gearboxes, plus certain permitted suspension parts and other running gear. However the monocoque and the aerodynamic surfaces are designed by Haas, albeit using the Ferrari windtunnel. But it is still a cut-price way to go racing.

This set-up has caused many questions over time, just as the relationship between Red Bull Racing and the entity currently known as Scuderia AlphaTauri is now causing discussion. The likelihood is that such arrangements will be phased out over time and the teams involved will have to expand accordingly to bring things in-house.  Ultimately, an F1 entry is worth a lot but the value of the team is also dependent on its industrial capacity and its ability to function independently. It is clear that teams like Haas cannot become winners unless they take this next step. The good news is that as a result of the budget cap teams now have a great deal of value and we have seen this reflected in investment coming in. Haas could sell shares and use the money to invest in new infrastructure but for reasons that are not entirely clear Gene Haas has not done that. He has turned down all offers for the team and seems happy to go on running it as it is. This is fine, but it will not make the team better.

I would guess that this was probably the stumbling point between Haas and Steiner because moving forward would need more cash and settling for not having that investment would mean further seasons with little hope for progress. I am sure that the disappointing results in 2023 are part of the story, but I am surprised that the two have split. Steiner is an ambitious fellow, but he is also a realist and he knows what the team needs.

We will have to see how things go with Ayao Komatsu in charge, but I doubt we will see any miracles. F1 is complex and expensive these days and moving forward takes money and good people.

There is another side to this that is important for F1. Steiner is important as one of the sport’s biggest stars. Beyond a few of the drivers, he is F1’s biggest star. People started loving Guenther thanks to the Netflix docudramas “Drive to Survive”. Yes, he’s an odd individual and wildly idiosyncratic, but he is popular because he is not corporate. He says what he thinks, in a colourful way, and F1 cannot afford to lose that. F1 needs big characters to keep the audiences fascinated. Stefano Domenicali understands this and I would not be surprised to see Steiner turning up in some ambassadorial role for F1. I’m pretty sure that the sport hasn’t seen the last of him.

The team is also expected to announce soon that its technical director Simone Resta has also resigned with stories suggesting that he does not agree with the way the team is developing, which would tie in with Steiner’s departure.

What is odd is that Haas has not apparently shopped around for a new team principal. Several are on the market but Gene Haas has decided to go with Komatsu. The team says that there will be a European-based Chief Operating Officer to manage all non-competition matters and departments.

Komatsu (47) grew up in Tokyo. His father was a musicologist who specialised in Beethoven and wrote books about the celebrated German composer. Ayao became interested in motorcycling racing because Norick Abe attended a school near his. He then became interested in F1 as a result of the McLaren-Honda success with Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost. He decided he wanted to become a motorsport engineer and headed to the UK in 1994, initially attending a language school and then getting  a place to study automotive engineering at Loughborough University. While he was studying he went to races at Silverstone and met Takuma Sato, who was starting the Formula 3 championship. The two began working together and after he graduated one of the F1 teams agreed to fund  doctorate because it would then be easier to get a work permit. Sato then helped him to get a job with British American Racing at the end of 2003, working  in vehicle dynamics, focussing on tyres. In 2006 Renault was looking for an engineer with such knowledge and made him an offer and he stayed at Enstone, moving more into performance engineering, first with the test team and then with the racing team. He became a race engineer in 2011 with Vitaly Petrov before starting to work with Romain Grosjean. In 2014 he became chief race engineer at the team, then known as Lotus, and then followed Grosjean to Haas in 2016.

I am sure everyone has heard about it but I would like to say that I am delighted that finally Ron Dennis has become Sir Ron.

Christian Horner was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), the last level below a knighthood, for his leadership of Red Bull Racing. Some think an honour should perhaps also have gone to Adrian Newey. It should be noted that the honours system is peculiar in that awards rarely come in quick succession and so Horner will probably have to wait another 10 years before having any chance of a knighthood. Newey, however, could be knighted as his only recognition thus far was his appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2012 New Year Honours. Horner was previously made an OBE in the summer of 2013.

However, the system is not perfect as John Barnard has never been recognised for his achievements in the sport, while John Surtees’s extraordinary achievements on two and four wheels deserved a knighthood, which never came. Another man who has been largely ignored is Peter Wright, who did remarkable work as an F1 designer and has since played a major role in improving motor racing safety.

The New Year Honours list also included a CBE for Charles Gordon-Lennox, the Duke of Richmond, better known in the racing world as Lord March (or Charlie March) before he succeeded to his various dukedoms in 2017. He is the owner of Goodwood and established the hugely-successful Goodwood Festival of Speed in 1993, revived racing on the Goodwood circuit and established the Goodwood Revival event in 1998. He also serves as the President of the British Automobile Racing Club.

With that I think I’ll go back into hibernation for a little longer…