“They are also lucky to have a good, paid job in Formula 1”- Guenther Steiner calls F1 staff privileged

“They are also lucky to have a good, paid job in Formula 1”- Guenther Steiner calls Formula 1 cars privileged citing cost-cutting measures.

Formula 1 released a cramped schedule for 2021 while placing 23 races and having minimal rest in between, which will compel the whole F1 contingent to travel extensively.

This immediately aroused the fatigue concerns for the F1 crews working in all ten different paddock teams. However, for Guenther Steiner, they are still privileged, citing the cost-cutting measures, which are a consequence of the budget caps.

He told GPFans Global: “It isn’t easy. Is it difficult? There are more difficulties than this that is for sure. With the calendar with so many races, they get tired, you don’t have the results, and you don’t get the hype and the adrenaline.

“When you are racing, you are on the back foot so, but, I don’t think people realise they are also lucky to have a good, paid job in Formula 1 because with the budget cap coming, there will be fewer people in Formula 1 and everyone who has got a job here is privileged.

“For sure, they need to work hard because there are a lot of people knocking on the door for these jobs at the moment because there are going to be less.”

Expecting nothing from 2021

Haas had an impressive start to their Formula 1 trade in 2016 and 2017, but the team hit a disappointing slope from 2019 and was nothing better in 2020.

Going into 2021, Steiner is not expecting much from this year, holding pandemic and now regulations responsible for this miserable state of affairs.

“I think in 2019, the car was not at it’s best, and I think we recovered quite a bit of that by the end of the year ahead of last year, but last year, the car we had out was not the car we wanted to run for the whole season but then in the pandemic,” he said.

“There was the lockdown, and at some stage, we just had to do the survival game. Then we didn’t develop, and once we knew and defined what we wanted to do in the future, it was too late to do development. It slipped away in 2019, but we just had a bad year, which happens.

“We were working hard to get out of that bad year, but then the pandemic happened and knocked us back another step. We never recovered from that one, and I don’t think with this car,” he added.

“With the technical regulations, we will not recover because we are too far behind, but we still don’t give up. We will try to make a better car for this year.”

About the author

Tanish Chachra

Tanish Chachra is the Motorsport editor at The SportsRush. He saw his first race when F1 visited India in 2011, and since then, his romance with the sport has been seasonal until he took up this role in 2020. Reigniting F1's coverage on this site, Tanish has fallen in love with the sport all over again. He loves Kimi Raikkonen and sees a future world champion in Oscar Piastri. Away from us, he loves to snuggle inside his books.

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