Haas thinks sponsors will come aboard in due time

Haas thinks American sponsors will support a French and Mexican driver

Gene Haas is not worried by the lack of sponsors on his team's new F1 car, the VF-16, as his team has not competed in a grand prix yet.

Haas' 2016 challenger broke cover this week and enjoyed an encouraging first test despite a number of reliability issues. In Barcelona there has been a notable lack of sponsors on the car and racesuits other than those brought by drivers Romain Grosjean and Esteban Gutierrez.

Haas says money, and not interest, has been preventing other deals so far.

When first asked about the sponsorship issue, Haas laughed and said: "We have lots of people who want to sponsor us but they won't pay us the money we want!"

Haas thinks some sponsors are waiting to see how the new team fares in the first few races of the season before making the decision to commit to a sponsorship deal.

"We don't have a product yet. We have nothing to sell to anybody and I think people would be afraid of going on track and embarrassing your name. If you look bad they won't want to sponsor you. I am optimistic we are going to look professional, that we can compete on a level that other teams will respect and that should make sponsor say there is a product, we can see it, it can deliver and that should make them feel more comfortable about wanting to sponsor us.

"It works well for our brand, we're happy, but if the right sponsor comes along and wants to sponsor us we're definitely going to listen to that. But at the same time we're not desperate, we don't need sponsors to do what we're doing. I think we're very efficient at what we do, our budget is very reasonable for what we're trying to do, so when the right partner comes along that's when we make that change."

Part of Haas' motivation for joining F1 was to promote his machine tool company, Haas Automation, on an international scale. He suggests he would like to have an American product on the car at some point.

Asked what sort of sponsors he was looking for to go alongside that brand, he replied: "Consumer brands. You look at what is on the track today [in F1], exotic cars, energy drinks, anything that has mass appeal. I think we could do a good job of marketing a product, especially an American product all over the world.

"If there's an American team out there and Americans know you're doing something nobody else has done before, Americans would be very interested in that. The problem with Formula One in the past is that they've really had no association — 'these are a bunch of Europeans, who are these people' — but I think being an American in a European sport people are going to want to see two things, how badly you do or can you beat these guys. If we can beat them or at least keep up with them they're going to want to watch to see if you beat them and if you don't how bad do you crash!" Espn.com