The potty mouthed star of Drive To Survive on how his career blew up

Guenther Steiner is an unlikely sort of hero. Until January this year, he was the high-profile team principal of a low-profile motor-racing team. His reputation and global popularity is chiefly down to being a star of the Netflix series Formula 1: Drive to Survive, in which he has become nothing less than a legend due to, in his own words, ‘having no filter and not giving a s—t about what people think of me’.

Formula 1 is probably one of the richest sports in the world in terms of money spent and money generated (even Haas, Steiner’s former team, which is usually at the lower end of the constructors’ table, has been valued at a billion dollars). Putting a team together to compete in F1 is a mammoth task, requiring an inconceivable amount of investment and dedication, but Guenther Steiner started the team from scratch, having spent three years courting backers.

In the end he convinced Gene Haas, a Californian machine-tool manufacturer, to finance it (which took over a year of persuasion), managed to secured a licence from the FIA (Bernie Ecclestone, more persuasion), introduced the initiative of buying transferable parts from other manufacturers – in this case Ferrari and Dallara – oversaw the building of the car and recruited the drivers.

Haas’s first car, the VF-16, was launched in Barcelona in February 2016. In their very first race, the French-Swiss driver Romain Grosjean finished sixth, with the team fifth in the Constructors’ Championship. It was one of the strongest opening weekends for a new team in the history of Formula 1. But eight years later, Haas has still never had a podium finish – and has come last or second last in the Constructors’ Championship four times in the last five years.

It’s complicated, but Steiner’s version of events is that this deterioration was due to a lack of investment and commitment by Gene Haas. Nevertheless, in January of this year, according to Steiner, he was effectively fired (well, his contract was not renewed) by Haas on the phone, while he was standing at the deli counter in a supermarket in Merano, staring at a piece of ham.

He says he has not spoken to Gene Haas since. What is he going to do now?

‘I’m unemployed,’ the 59-year-old deadpans, on Zoom from his home in North Carolina, sitting in a wood-panelled room and wearing a nice green shirt. ‘No, I’m joking! I’ve just written another book [Unfiltered; his first book, Surviving to Drive, was a bestseller], and the day after it was announced that I’d left Haas, I got so many requests for TV work. I’m working as a pundit for German company RTL – and I did the first race in Australia this year with Damon Hill, it was fun. And I’ve got my company [Fibreworks], which is run by my partner. And I’m working on a few other projects. If people ask me to do things which are new challenges, I usually say yes – I like new challenges. And I’ve got a few lawsuits going with Haas – that keeps me busy as well…’

He laughs – his trademark contagious high-pitched laugh which offsets his stern, slightly unhinged demeanour. Steiner is clearly not bored and neither is he heartbroken, and his wife of 30 years, Gertie, says he has a spring in his step that he hasn’t had for a decade. But he is a bit resentful about the way it ended. ‘It wasn’t unexpected – I wasn’t sure if I wanted to stay anyway. And now I’m free again – I’m no longer overwhelmed by a job that I can’t do because someone else won’t let me do it properly. I was upset that I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to the team, some of whom I’d worked with for 10 years. And how it was done was very unprofessional.’

‘It came down to performance,’ Gene Haas told Formula 1 correspondent Lawrence Barretto in January. ‘Here we are in our eighth year, over 160 races – and we have never had a podium… I’m not saying it’s Guenther’s fault, but it just seems like an appropriate time to make a change… I have no interest in being 10th any more.’

It must have hurt, as even though Haas owned the team, it was Steiner’s idea and execution, and entirely down to his hard work that it ever got off the ground. ‘He built a team that could outperform its resources with strong qualifying and race performances,’ writes Steiner’s friend Toto Wolff, team principal of Mercedes, in the introduction to Unfiltered. ‘And the way he stands out from the crowd made him gold dust for the filmmakers at Netflix – well, that and his potty mouth.’

Yes, his potty mouth. Steiner is famous for his liberal use of the F-word, which is inherently comical in his German-Italian accent. He puts his bad language down to his background in rally car racing, but says he is not allowed to swear at home. But in Drive to Survive, his unguarded persona made him a star. There are T-shirts – Top Günth – and merchandise emblazoned with favourite Steiner phrases, such as ‘He does not fok smash my door’ (after a row in which Haas driver Kevin Magnussen slammed a door so hard it broke) and ‘Umbrellas hurt my ego’ after the umbrella incident. (In Saudi Arabia someone asked Steiner if he needed an umbrella to protect him from the blazing sun and Steiner replied, ‘Fok off, that would hurt my ego, standing there with an umbrella.’ Then the camera cut to another team principal standing beneath an umbrella held for him by a lackey, and consequently looking a little foolish.)

Steiner himself claims never to have watched Drive to Survive. ‘If I did I might see things I don’t like about myself and start altering my behaviour,’ he writes in Unfiltered. ‘Don’t fok with perfection, that’s what I think!’

‘In general, I don’t watch myself in anything,’ he says now. ‘I try to avoid it. It would be cringe.’ His unguarded persona was a welcome character in the show, and he allowed the makers full access from the start (some teams – Ferrari and Mercedes – refused to participate in the first series, but changed their minds when they saw how popular it was). He will be missed.

‘Yes,’ agreed James Gay-Rees, Drive to Survive’s creator, earlier this year. ‘He was the first person we sat down to talk with at the beginning and he said, “Ask me anything. I don’t care – you do whatever you like.” And he was true to his word. He would wear more microphones than anyone else, he let us have access into more situations. He’s just a really decent human being.’

‘I would say that one of the main things that kept us afloat in the years after 2020,’ Steiner writes, ‘which is when I swapped running a competitive team for mainly problem-solving and firefighting, in terms of both morale and exposure, was Drive to Survive. Had that not come along, Haas would not have had the love people have shown the team over recent years, and I know for a fact it made a big difference.’

It takes a great deal more than talent to be a successful F1 driver. It takes ambition and motivation, but also having the right people around you. In the history of Formula 1 so far, there have been 777 drivers, and only 34 champions – that statistic says a lot. Haas has been through quite a few drivers, with sometimes dramatic results. Rookie Russian Nikita Mazepin, whose father was the team’s main sponsor in 2021 via his fertiliser company Uralkali, was ousted when Russia declared war on Ukraine. Mick Schumacher (son of seven times world champion Michael) was ‘let go’ at the end of 2022; he was, according to Steiner, a nice kid with plenty of talent, but reportedly cost the team millions of dollars in crashes in two years.

But nothing can compare with the 2020 crash of Haas driver Romain Grosjean in Bahrain, when he hit the barrier at around 145mph with 100kg of fuel on board, splitting the car in two, with the front half consumed in a fireball. It looked very bad indeed, and there was silence on the track, then huge relief when Grosjean emerged from the fire after 28 long seconds. His only injuries were some bad burns to his hands.

Grosjean retired from Formula 1 after that – and the charred remains of the chassis of his car are currently the biggest attraction at the major F1 exhibition at ExCeL in London. ‘It is unbelievable that somebody survived that,’ says Steiner. ‘I think there must have been a little bit of magic involved there too.’

If that was the most shocking moment in his time at Haas, what does Steiner consider to be his greatest achievement? ‘I think my proudest moment would be when we got to Australia in 2016 [for the Haas team’s very first Grand Prix] because we had so many people saying, this will never work. But we did our homework, started the race and finished in the points – that was a great moment. Just making it happen was better than getting points.’

His chief talent as a team principal, he says when pressed, was ‘I’m really good at getting things together, motivating them in the right way – with honesty, not giving them any bulls—t. Because I’m passionate and I work hard, they looked up to me, and I was always there for them, I’m very approachable. That was my strong point, leading a company by example.’

‘During his time with Haas,’ writes Wolff, ‘Guenther developed what we can politely call a “unique” leadership style. It was like he read a management textbook, then decided to do the opposite in almost every situation.’ The book, co-authored with ghostwriter James Hogg, is a witty, well-structured and highly entertaining account of Steiner’s time with Haas, with lots of juicy anecdotes thrown in, and stories of his childhood in South Tyrol.

Steiner grew up in Merano. He started out as a mechanic in rally teams, then became director of engineering, and joined Jaguar Racing in 2001 after being headhunted by Niki Lauda. He came to North Carolina 18 years ago, with his wife Gertie, in order to run the Nascar team for Red Bull, and his daughter Greta was born in 2009. They travel back to Europe frequently and have a place in Merano, and he recently opened a guest house there, Villa Steiner, after buying a five-bedroomed house on impulse five years ago.

An image of a certain famous foul-mouthed hotelier immediately springs to mind, and he writes about this in the book. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said to his friend Stuart Morrison [head of communications for Haas]. ‘Don’t say another word. You think I’m going to become some kind of Basil foking Fawlty.’

‘Actually, that’s exactly what I was thinking.’

‘I knew it.’

‘Who’d be Manuel?’

‘I don’t know. How about Fernando Alonso?’

The guest house, partly designed by his wife, has a Formula 1 theme – with suites based on different Grand Prix locations – Suzuka, Monte Carlo etc. Steiner is not involved in running it, but, he writes, ‘There is still a tiny part of me that wishes we’d turned it into a hotel with me hitting Alonso over the head with a frying pan every two minutes and calling the guests w--kers, but there we go,’ he says. ‘You cannot have everything in life.’

An extract from Steiner’s new book, Unfiltered: My Incredible Decade in Formula 1

There are two rumours, or should I say assumptions, about how I got into motorsport. One is that I was an engineer, which is on those stupid websites that claim to know everything but are actually full of bulls—t, and the other, which I think is just an assumption, is that I had once been a racing driver.

Unlike my esteemed and very rich amigos and former colleagues Christian Horner and Toto Wolff, I have never failed at being a racing driver, and for the simple reason that I have never been a racing driver. I have always been a Guenther. I can drive, however, and have been doing so with varying degrees of safety and success since I was 14 years old. I was brought up in a valley in South Tyrol which is on the edge of the Dolomites in Italy, and on a Sunday morning my parents would take me and my sister to visit our grandparents. ‘Guenther, would you like to drive us there?’ my father, Josef, once said to me. ‘I’ll teach you as we go.’ Well, you can imagine what I said. ‘Give me the foking keys, Vater!’ I couldn’t believe he was asking me. I mean, would you hand the keys to your beautiful green Fiat 124 to an awkward 14-year-old who has never driven a car before in his entire life? Of course you foking wouldn’t. What was he thinking?

In all fairness, I had been asking him if I could have a go at driving the car for years (they call it pester power these days), and he ended up being a very patient teacher. Subsequently, I managed to pick it up in no time at all and it soon became a regular thing. I’ll never forget the first time it happened. It would have been the summer of 1979, and when my father handed me the keys to his beloved car, which was his pride and joy, my mother almost had a foking heart attack. ‘No, Josef,’ she said, ‘he’s not old enough, Guenther’s just a boy!’ What she really meant was: ‘If you give that idiot the keys to our car, he’ll kill us all!’

‘Guenther will be fine,’ said my father confidently. ‘He’s been watching me drive his whole life. Let’s give him a chance.’ Before my mother could say anything else I grabbed the keys from my father’s hand, jumped into the driver’s seat and started the engine. What a foking feeling that was! One minute I was a slightly clumsy and overtly tall teenage pedestrian who occasionally used a bike, and the next I was a young man with no less than 55 brake-horsepower at his disposal. It was a true coming of age.

The first thing I did was stall the car.

‘I told you he wasn’t ready,’ yelped my mother, cowering on the back seat with my sister. ‘Swap places, Josef. Swap places!’

‘Nein, Mutter!’ I protested, and then tried again. As the 11-year-old 1,438cc engine began to purr beneath the bonnet, I looked back at my terrified mother, smiled at her victoriously, put the car into gear, and then stalled it again. ‘Scheisse!’ I hissed.

‘You see, Josef?’ said my mother, leaning forward. ‘The boy hasn’t even started driving yet and already he is using bad language.’

‘Just a little bit more throttle next time, Guenther,’ suggested my father calmly. ‘You’ll get the hang of it soon.’

As momentous as that event undoubtedly was, I don’t remember feeling nervous at all. Just excited. It all came very naturally though and after a few trips even my mother felt comfortable in the car with me. On one occasion she even sat in the front seat with me.

This was probably the first in what has become a very long line of things I have done in my life but shouldn’t really have been allowed to, such as starting a Formula 1 team and writing two foking books. My driving style, incidentally, has merited a wide range of descriptions over the years, some of the most popular being ‘perilously unsafe’, ‘dangerously erratic’ and – my own personal favourite – ‘completely foking illegal’. I’ve never had a crash though. Or at least not a big one. I may have caused a few over the years, but that doesn’t count. Tickets, yes (more than they sell for Silverstone), but crashes, no.

The only time I have ever been paid to drive a car was when I was doing my national service. A possible life in motorsport hadn’t even occurred to me then, but while acting as a chauffeur for a general in the Italian army, I began to harbour a few small dreams about becoming a racing driver. Ultimately, although I enjoyed driving, I knew instinctively that I didn’t have what it takes. Actually, that isn’t strictly true. I had a good idea that I didn’t have what it takes. What I definitely didn’t have was the desire to dedicate my life to finding out and in the process probably bankrupt myself. What I was left with though, when the dreams of becoming a racing driver began to fade, was the aforementioned desire to work in motorsport. Forty years on, that is as strong as ever. In that respect I’m just like Christian and Toto really, just without the endeavour, expenditure, failure and embarrassment. That would come later for me!

Once again, because I am the overlord of world motorsport, there’s an assumption among some deluded people that I must own a fleet of vintage Ferraris and keep them all in a warehouse in a secret location. In actual fact, the only car I own at the moment is a Toyota Tundra, which is a pick-up truck. It’s big (or at least too foking big to drive in Europe), it’s comfortable, it has nice heated seats which is essential for a man of my advancing years, and it’s great to drive. I foking love it.

I used to own a Porsche 911 when I lived in England, which I suppose was a kind of midlife crisis. I was working for the German-based Opel DTM Team at the time, so it was some commute, and for my 40th birthday I decided to treat myself to a brand-new black 911. At first I was thrilled to foking bits with it and drove around like the Lord of Milton Keynes. Pretty soon, though, the novelty began to wear off and I came to the conclusion that it’s only worth owning a car like that if you have time to enjoy it. I didn’t. In fact, because of the commute I barely had time to go to the toilet while I worked for Opel, let alone take a sportscar out on a Sunday morning to drive around and look like a wanker. I’ll leave that to all the retired lawyers and accountants.

Extracted from Unfiltered: My Incredible Decade in Formula 1, by Guenther Steiner (Bantam, £22, out 10 October)