NASCAR boss makes F1 move

An American team backed by NASCAR team owner Gene Haas declared its interest in joining the Formula One grid.

The FIA have previously announced that they have opened the tendering process for a new team to enter Formula One.

The Formula One paddock shrank to eleven teams after the former Hispania/HRT team dissolved at the end of the 2012 season.

It brought an end to the team after just two seasons and whilst Caterham and Marussia, who also entered F1 in 2011, appear to be doing well at the back end of the grid, they too have had financial issues and have previously held merger talks.

In fact financial problems are not just affecting the teams at the tail end of the grid, Sauber have struggled on and off for a number of years, whilst the Lotus team have seemingly struggled to bring in investment and eventually had to concede and sign pay-driver Pastor Maldonado.

Unfortunately the poor financial state of Formula One has brought the sport to the point where many in the media would not have been surprised if one or even several teams failed to make it through to the start of the new 2014 season in March this year.

It doesn’t appear to be a coincidence that teams started to talk about the prospect of three driver teams for next season during race weekends in Abu Dhabi and Brazil at the tail end of 2013.

So the news of a possible ’12th team’ to enter the sport as early as 2015, can only be seen as good news for the sport.

The first possible applicant to make their intentions public are Gene Haas and Guenther Steiner.

Haas has had many years in American motor racing, he co-owned the Indy Car team Newman-Haas which 1992 Formula One World Champion Nigel Mansell won the 1993 title with and alongside Tony Stewart, he now owns a team in USA’s top motor sport series NASCAR.

Meanwhile Steiner is a former technical director at Red Bull and Jaguar.

‘We have responded to the FIA’s call for expression of interest regarding a Formula 1 entry on behalf of Haas Racing Development, We respect the FIA’s evaluation process and will share more details in the coming weeks.’

New teams in Formula One are rare, since 2002, only Toyota, Super Aguri, Caterham, Marussia and HRT have entered the sport with only Caterham and Marussia remaining on the grid with both teams going three full seasons without scoring a single world championship point.