Haas boss Guenther Steiner confirmed that the team is already working on the 2023 car, and believes that a possible change in the technical regulations to avoid quibbles would hinder progress
The war for a possible change in the Formula One rules motivated by porpoising continues to rage in the backstage of the category. Last weekend, the battle between the teams that seek a change in the rules and those who want to keep the technical regulations that debuted this year and brought the cars to a standstill became clear. Guenther Steiner, for example, considers it too late for the rules to be changed.
Still in Le Castellet for last weekend's French GP, the Haas boss confirmed that his team opposes the possible changes and argued that the American team has even started development of next year's car, which could be impacted with a sudden change to the current regulations.
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"We are in the group of six teams that don't want changes," Steiner explained. "We are happy with where we are now. We want to keep [the regulations] or find a middle ground so that we don't have to start from scratch our development of the 2023 car. We started very early with the 2023 car, and if you change the rules now, we find that it's a little bit too late for that," he added.
The "group of six" to which Steiner refers includes, in addition to Haas: Red Bull, Ferrari, AlphaTauri, Alfa Romeo, and Williams. In the opinion of these teams, the change would benefit one team and harm the others, since the main interest in the changes is Mercedes - precisely the one that suffered the biggest blow from one year to the next, from eight consecutive champions to the third force in the championship.
Another to make clear his annoyance with a possible change was Christian Horner, Red Bull's boss, who made a point to criticize the German team when commenting on the subject. After the Briton's statement, Mercedes' boss, Toto Wolff, also did not let it go quietly and answered his rival.
"I think there is a very strong lobby to change the rules significantly for next year, so that a certain team can run their car lower and benefit from this concept," Horner criticized, in an obvious allusion to Mercedes. "And now, we know, it's very late in the year to change that," he opined.