Read an Excerpt
OFF SEASON
Monday, 13 December 2021—Yas Marina Circuit, Yas Island, Abu Dhabi
It probably won’t surprise many people that I am starting my book with a swear word but all I can say is, thank fok that season is over! It’s been a nightmare from start to finish. I don’t drink very much but this year I’ve been tempted to take it up professionally. Whisky on a foking drip. That’s what I needed sometimes!
It hasn’t just been this year, though. The shit goes back even further than that. Being kicked out of Melbourne at the start of 2020 was probably where it all began. We thought we’d be racing again in a couple of weeks’ time but what was actually ahead of us all was months and months of uncertainty. Will we survive? Will we even race again? Nobody knew, you know. It’s no secret that there were probably four teams that could easily have gone under during that time, including us. Pete Crolla, our team manager, had meetings with the FIA and Formula 1 two or three times a week, and while he fed everything back to Gene Haas and me, we tried to keep everything afloat. Even the sport itself was under threat for a time because we didn’t know how long the pandemic would last. Would it be three months? Would it be three years? Would it be three generations?
In the end Formula 1 basically shut down for about ninety days. That’s incredible, when you think about it. Especially for a sport that is famous for progression. The only time this sport ever comes close to shutting down is during the summer break and over Christmas. But even then there is a lot ticking along in the background. Me, for instance. You think that I shut down in the summer and over Christmas? Don’t be ridiculous. I have things to do. That ninety days, though, was a pretty shit time.
The thing that Formula 1 as a whole did right during those ninety days was to carry on as if things would eventually get better, at least as much as it was possible. This meant that when we could come up for air and start racing again we’d be ready to go. A lot of people worked hard to make that happen and it was a big risk. I mean, how long can you keep an engine ticking over before it finally runs out of gas or goes wrong? It was a nervous time.
We as a team had to do a lot of restructuring in order to keep us ticking over, so it wasn’t just a case of carrying on and hoping for the best. For sure, nobody was able to do that. One element of the ‘return to racing’ programme that was devised by the FIA and Formula 1 was the continuation of the existing regulations so, rather than produce a brand new car concept for the following season, we had to develop the existing cars. Unfortunately, for reasons I’ll very soon explain, our 2020 car wasn’t a great one so instead of trying to develop that for the rest of 2020 and throughout 2021, which would have been like trying to polish a turd, to be honest with you, we made the decision to use it again as it was, give or take, and put everything into developing a new car concept using the new regulations that were coming into place.
I have to pay tribute to Gene here because he could easily have taken a different viewpoint and said, Fok this for a game of soldiers. A lot of people would have, I think. Especially with all the uncertainty that was still surrounding the sport. Even when we started racing again nobody knew how long it would last. Every day we were reading about [the pandemic] and so we were always looking over our shoulders.
In all my years in motorsport, the decision to write off the 2021 season is the hardest I have ever been involved in. We’re all competitive people and so actually choosing to be shit for an entire season goes against everything we believe in and are striving every day to achieve. Every single race weekend put the team on a downward spiral. On arriving at the track they’d all try and be upbeat but then over the course of the weekend they’d start to sink. ‘What are we even doing here?’ they’d say. ‘This is shit!’ My main job during the whole of that season was to tell the team as many times as I needed to exactly why we were doing what we were doing and remind them that there was light at the end of the tunnel. Or should I say, the wind tunnel. You see, I’m also a foking comedian!
‘Look, guys, better times are ahead,’ I kept saying to them. ‘You have to believe that.’ Fortunately, they did and they stuck with it. We’ve got a really, really good bunch of people in the team at the moment. Sixty per cent of our staff have been with us for four or five years or more, which is pretty foking cool. We might not be able to retain form very well sometimes, but we’re great at retaining staff.
Writing off the 2021 season was the correct thing to do, though. I’m sure of it. Gene is, too. In 2020, which was a normal season for us in terms of spending and development (but turned out to be shit for all kinds of different reasons), our entire budget was roughly $173 million, whereas Ferrari’s was $463 million and Mercedes’ even more than that. Almost half a billion. That’s a big gap, you know. Even if we’d spent half of our allocated wind tunnel time on the 2021 car we’d still have finished last. Why would we do that? I’ve been in motorsport for thirty-six years and sometimes you have to just surrender to the circumstances and improve things when you can.
In 2021, as part of the new rules which were designed to make the sport more competitive, the share of the budget that’s performance-critical—design and development, component manufacture and testing—was limited to $145 million per team, and in order to take full advantage of that we decided to run the 2020 car in 2021 and put as much money as we could into developing the car for 2022. The top three salaries at each team aren’t included in this so it means that the guys at Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull can still gain an advantage by hiring the best people. Or at least three of them. I’m OK with that. It’s better than it was.
We’re all competitive people and every person who works for every team on the grid obviously wants their team to do well. OK, so we’re not likely to win many races anytime soon. In 2018, though, Haas, who were, and still are, the smallest team on the grid, scored ninety-three points and finished fifth in the Constructors’ Championship. That’s not bad for a team that was also only three years old at the time. We’re not stupid.
The only thing that really kept the team going last season was that in the background we’d been developing a car that will hopefully make us competitive again in 2023. So far in our history we’ve had two promising seasons in 2016 and 2017, a foking brilliant season in 2018, a pretty difficult season in 2019, a shit season in 2020 and a dead season in 2021. That’s three on each side. There’s a hell of a lot riding on what we’re trying to achieve right now. Not to mention what happens next.
Anyway, I’m flying to Italy in a few hours so have to go. Ciao!
