Guenther Steiner was picking up cold cuts with his wife when he found out his Formula 1 job was over.
“I was at the deli counter picking up my ham for the night, or salami, and my wife was with me,” the former Haas team principal recalled on the High Performance podcast.
He passed the news on there and then.
“I told her, ‘I’m not with Haas anymore,’ and she said, ‘What do you mean?’ all in the supermarket.”
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The call had come from team owner Gene Haas. Steiner was not surprised by it, and he did not lose any sleep over it either.
“I slept perfectly and I was even happier the next morning when I got up because a new world opened and I just wanted to move on in life.”
Two years past the point of no return
The more revealing admission was not the setting but the timing.
“I think I stayed two years too long.”
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“What I should have done was just say, ‘Hey, it’s not working. I’m leaving now.'”
He and the ownership had been drifting apart for a while. Steiner wanted the kind of investment and infrastructure the Haas family was not going to sign off on, and by his own account he had known it for years before the decision was taken out of his hands.
“I didn’t agree with where the team was going. My vision was different than the owner’s.”
He did not fight the exit.
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“[The decision] was taken away, but I was pretty happy that it was taken away.”
Steiner now runs Tech3 in MotoGP
Steiner left Haas at the end of the 2023 season. The character who defined the American team’s Netflix years has since moved into MotoGP.
He led a consortium that took full ownership of the Tech3 team, in a deal announced at the Catalan GP in September 2025 and taking effect for 2026. Steiner is CEO. Richard Coleman is team principal, and founder Hervé Poncharal has moved into a consultancy role centred on young talent.
The setup is deliberately not a copy of Haas. Steiner has said he will not try to replicate the team principal job at Tech3, and will focus on commercial decisions and the long term rather than the daily running of the garage.
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