F1: Haas team boss shows his anti-American colors again

Haas F1 team boss Guenther Steiner has looked down his nose at American drivers his entire career.

He was happy to take rookie drivers like German Mick Schumacher and Russian Nikita Mazepin with zero F1 experience, but never would he give an American a chance even though his team owner, American Gene Haas, was paying his salary.

Never one cover up his blatant dislike for American drivers, Steiner was asked by Texan television station KVUE what it would take for Haas to run an American driver in the future.

Get a load of his latest excuse.

“Absolutely we would like to see it, but I think the answer is not a simple ‘what would it take?’.

“I mean, what would it take is a consequence,” he explained. “So I think what we need to see is to make a development of an American driver, which is very difficult.”

Steiner implies American drivers would be near impossible to make good F1 drivers

Oh, but it was quite OK to take Schumacher and Mazepin.

“We had the last two years ago with two rookies, last year with one [inexperienced driver]. And we as a team are still very young. We are still the newest team in F1. And for us at the moment there is more performance to be gained for the team to make it better, to get ready, because at the moment there is no American driver with experience in F1.

“Therefore, we decided not to take an American again. So what does it take? It would take an American driver which has experience, and that is not there at the moment.”

“There is an American coming to F1 and there is not a lot of things around that. I missed that a little bit because everyone says ‘we want an American driver, we want to make a driver’. Okay, Haas hasn’t got an American driver but I still support Sargeant what he’s doing because he puts the feet in very cold water here. But there’s not a lot [of noise] behind it.

“So there is, I would say, no American driver with experience in F1. And there is one which is going to make it, and he needs all the support he can get at the moment. And I don’t think at the moment it’s there.

“So hopefully it comes, because I wish that he makes experience and then once he has made experience, he comes to us, the American team. How about that?”

It’s likely Sargeant would want to drive for soon to be approved American team owner Michael Andretti rather than for a team boss with an anti-American chip on his shoulder.

Mark C. reporting for AutoRacing1.com