Haas: “We’ll be proud to be Ferrari B team”

Gene Haas

Amid ongoing talk of F1 becoming the preserve of eight teams of three cars US tycoon Gene Haas says he'll be proud to be considered Ferrari's B team when his North Carolina based squad debuts in 2016.

Speaking ahead of the USGP in Austin, the 61-year-old Nascar team owner also expressed confidence that his F1 outfit will be founded on more solid business ground than the recent struggling back of the grid teams.

"We'd be very proud to be a Ferrari B team because that would certainly teach us how to run in Formula One and quite frankly we will take all the help they can give us," Haas told CNN. "You can't get any better than Ferrari.

"Ferrari wanted to go beyond being just an engine supplier and they were going to help us with the basic structures of the car.

"I think the biggest problem they (HRT, Marussia and Caterham) had is in trying to get to the grid so fast they wound up having to take on partnerships that maybe weren't thoroughly thought out.

"They wound up making a lot of mistakes. Inevitably they didn't have the resources or their cars weren't properly put together because they rushed things.

"In the first five years it's just surviving," Haas states as a definition of success in F1. "I don't have any expectation of grandeur that we're going to go out there and win championships. If we even win one race in five years I think that would be a tremendous success.

"Haas Automation right now is a billion dollar a year company and our goal is to get to two billion dollars a year. If I can achieve that, an extra billion a year in sales will well pay for whatever the Formula One costs." James Allen on F1