Guenther Steiner says the MoneyGram Haas F1 Team will find it difficult to rotate their staff during the 2023 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season, especially compared to some of the bigger teams on the grid.
2023 currently has twenty-four planned races, although one of those, the Chinese Grand Prix, has been cancelled and no replacement venue has been announced. Whether it is twenty-three or twenty-four races, it will still be the longest season in Formula 1 history.
Haas remain one of the smallest teams on the grid with one of the fewest levels of staff, and as such, they will not be able to switch around their mechanics and engineers across race weekends to give them a rest during the season.
Other teams are in the same boat, but the likes of Oracle Red Bull Racing, Scuderia Ferrari and the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team will have the luxury of rotating their staff across the season.
Steiner, the Team Principal at Haas, says he enjoys going to all the races and will only likely be absence in the case of illness, but he says the status of the team will not allow them to give race weekends off to their staff.
“I’m not as privileged as them, you know, I have to go to the races, actually – these are the rich people which can afford not to go because they’ve got so many people working for them,” Steiner said on Formula 1’s Beyond the Grid podcast.
“And to be honest, I don’t dislike to go to races. This is what I’m doing, what I like most. Going racing, it’s one of the things I do like. I will go, hopefully, with 24 races you never know if you’re sick on one race or something – I hope I’m not – and I will go to all the races.
“It is a long season, but rotating the staff? We don’t have a plan to rotate continuously, proper, whole team. There will be a few positions will rotate in the team. But the main people, the mechanics and the engineers, will be always the same.”