More details on the new HAAS entry for 2015
More details emerged today regarding the Gene Haas Formula One project which was officially granted a
license on Friday.
The team is definitely going to be based in the USA in the new section of their current NASCAR base which is nearing completion. The team will also operate a European base for that part of the season as logistics during F1’s summer months in Europe would be extremely hard flying back and forth to Calafornia.
The team has yet to choose an engine partner and is in advanced discussion with Dallara over the building of the first car. Gene Haas gave this interview to Autosport:
“We’re not looking to start our own shop,” Haas confirmed when asked by AUTOSPORT if he was looking for a partner to design and build a car for him. “We’ve had preliminary talks with Dallara and they’re ready to go. They have a complete facility, they’re experienced, [and] they’ve been involved in racing forever as far as I can remember.
“It would be insurmountable to say we going to figure out how to build a chassis by ourselves and hire all the people in nine months. We’re going to have to compromise on what we do with construction of the car and acquire whatever we can. We want to learn We’re not going to just go over there and say ‘build us a chassis’, we want to put people in there to learn the processes because ultimately our goal is to become a constructor Our [first] car is not going to be the Haas Formula car entirely, a lot of the technology will come from our partners to begin with. But we’ll learn and figure it out and eventually the car will evolve into our own.”
Haas also revealed that he has the option to defer the entry until 2016 if necessary as it is a very tight schedule to make it for 2015.
The motivation for the entry was also discussed with Haas revealing that the decision has been made to promote his machine tooling business which already has a good market share in the USA but he wants to grow globally, it was decided that the best way to achieve that would be to use Formula One.
The team will be called Haas Formula.
