Haas team principal Guenther Steiner is not worried about possible accusations of the revised Haas car being similar to Ferrari’s challenger.
Haas’ first major upgrades of the season were spotted ahead of the Hungarian GP. The updated parts have a similar design to the ones that are on Ferrari’s F1-75 car.
Haas and Ferrari have a close cooperation and concerns regarding it were raised throughout the years.
When asked whether he expects the Haas car to be called a “white Ferrari”, Steiner replied: “I expect to be fast. If somebody says we copy, then why should we copy the Williams?
“I mean, no disrespect to Williams, but it’s a completely different concept and they are behind us. So if you copy something, you copy the best you can and, at the moment, it’s Ferrari and Red Bull.
“We have the same engine as Ferrari, same gearbox, the same suspension, why would we copy anything else? And they’re winning races? So 1 and 1 is 2, and we are not stupid.
“There are three concepts out there: the Ferrari concept, the Red Bull concept, and the Mercedes concept.
“We are close to Ferrari, so obviously we’re going to see what Ferrari has done and copy that one. But it takes time because we had to launch the car and race, and then we had to go into the wind tunnel to do testing, looking at that car.
“I think we are in a good place for where we are supposed to be. We didn’t expect to come out this strong in the beginning.
“So we said let’s try to gain as much as possible and let’s look at what is out there and try to see which direction we can go; looking at them.”
