F1 | Haas passes FIA crash test for 2022

The American team disputed the last F1 season with a car very similar to the one from 2020, but with the changes in the regulations that will arrive next year, all the teams will have completely new cars,

Haas will finish assembling it at the Dallara factory in Italy, before flying to Barcelona for the first of two pre-season tests in February.

Team principal Gunther Steiner said he expected all of the FIA -mandated crash tests to be passed before Christmas, with the Haas account tweeting on Thursday that they had already been completed.

“We have done some preliminary crash tests because you don’t do the full chassis right away,” Steiner explained in Abu Dhabi earlier this month. “A part is made.”

“I hope we pass them, that’s the goal. And no, the car will not be assembled before [the first test] and this year we will assemble it again in Italy, as we did before.”

“We didn’t do it last year because it was an old car. It was the 2020 car that we had just rebuilt and that changed some things, but we are going to build it again in Italy, because all the technical people are there and a lot of the parts are manufactured by Dallara”.

“So it’s better to be at their facilities when we assemble the first car, and then from there we take it to Spain [for testing].”

Haas decided not to develop its car during the 2021 season, instead focusing on next year’s car, hoping to make a splash when the new regulations come into play.

That strategy meant the team spent the entire season at the back of the grid, being the only team not to score any points in 2021.

However, Steiner admits that Haas’ approach cannot hide the fact that the team is the smallest on the grid and that they cannot be expected to make much progress.

“I think we’ll still be the modest team, trying to punch above their weight, because our structure is exactly the same as it was in ’18, ’19,” he added.

“We have changed a bit, instead of using the people from Dallara we now have our own people and some from Ferrari, who were transferred from there due to the budget limit. But we are still the smallest team.

“I think people-wise, production-wise, we’re by far the smallest, so I think we’re still the team that we were in 2018. And we want to go back to ’16, ’17, ’18, ’19, like you want to call it. We still want to be known for being that.”