When in March 2016 a car with an American license finished sixth in its very first race, the paddock split. Some applauded. Others filed a protest before that car had even rolled onto the track.
Formula 1 lived for decades on a contradiction nobody wanted to resolve completely. The regulations required every participant to be a "constructor" — to design and build their own car. At the same time, those same regulations allowed buying from other constructors the power unit, gearbox, rear suspension, hydraulics, cooling systems — essentially everything behind the cockpit. The line between "constructor" and "buyer of a ready-made solution" was drawn through so-called listed parts — a list of components the team was obligated to develop in-house: chassis, aerodynamic surfaces, front suspension. Everything else was free-trade territory. Gene Haas, owner of the machine-tool empire Haas Automation, looked at that list through an industrialist's eyes: if the regulations say "you can buy it," then you should buy everything that's for sale.
Günther Steiner, a South Tyrolean with experience at Jaguar and Red Bull, became the architect of this model. The idea was radically pragmatic. Why spend hundreds of millions designing your own gearbox when Ferrari sells theirs — the very one carrying Sebastian Vettel around the track? Why build a factory in North Carolina when the Italian firm Dallara in Varano de' Melegari already has production facilities certified for composite monocoques? Steiner assembled the team like a LEGO builder who has some original bricks and some compatible ones. They designed the chassis and aero themselves, bought everything permissible from the Scuderia. Outsourced the body production to Dallara. The engineering group under Ayao Komatsu handled what the regulations wouldn't let them delegate.
What still surprises me is how openly Haas and Steiner talked about their strategy. No camouflage. No statements about "fully proprietary development." They came in and said: we're buyers at maximum depth, and the rules allow it.
The problem surfaced long before the VF-16 touched the tarmac at Albert Park. In November 2015, on the eve of the season finale in Abu Dhabi, a scandal erupted that can be described as a legal ambush. Mercedes submitted an official request to the stewards for clarification of the regulations — Appendices 6 and 8 of the Sporting Regulations, meaning the list of listed parts and aerodynamic testing restrictions (ATR). Force India signed onto the request as one of the first, and its technical director Andy Green framed the complaint without diplomacy: "It could be that engineers work in the tunnel for fifty hours — twenty-five for one team, twenty-five for another. The results aren't shared between teams, but what they learned — they still learned. We want to know where the limit is." Toto Wolff warned that otherwise there would begin "an arms race in the number of partners you can sign to develop faster," and Ron Dennis from McLaren-Honda added: "We need to make sure that doesn't happen, otherwise we'll have to follow their example."
The logic of the protesters was transparent. Force India — a team that had survived for years on a modest budget, built their own cars, paid for every hour of wind tunnel time. And now comes a newcomer who essentially gets half the car from Ferrari and builds the other half at Dallara's facilities. Yet this newcomer claims the same prize money, the same share of commercial revenue. To Force India, this looked like a legalized shortcut — a bypass turning the constructors' championship into a buyers' competition.
On November 29, 2015, the FIA stewards — Garry Connelly, Steve Stringwell, Derek Warwick, and Khalid Bin Shaiban — issued a decision on document No. 33. Haas was deemed compliant with the rules. But — and this "but" proved substantial — the FIA simultaneously published a list of eight actions that would henceforth be considered attempts to circumvent the regulations. A six-month quarantine, or "isolation," for any aerodynamicist moving between teams in either direction, including returning to a former employer. A ban on transferring data obtained under another party's ATR quota. A ban on purchasing aerodynamic surfaces from an external contractor if the resource on which they were developed wasn't counted in the buyer's quota. An obligation for teams sharing one tunnel to separate personnel, facilities, and IT infrastructure so data physically couldn't leak. The FIA also noted it had received verbal explanations from Mercedes, Red Bull, Ferrari, Williams, and Force India, written ones from Mercedes, Ferrari, Force India, and Manor, and had studied its own correspondence with Ferrari and Haas. Roughly speaking, the league said: "You can buy hardware, but you can't buy knowledge about how air flows around that hardware." The line was drawn precisely where aerodynamics began to determine competitiveness.
A separate thread of this story is manufacturing. A Formula 1 team must have a base, but the 2015 regulations didn't prescribe where exactly the monocoque should be manufactured. Haas registered its headquarters in Kannapolis, North Carolina, where Haas Automation's infrastructure and the NASCAR team's base were located. But building autoclaves, clean rooms for carbon fiber work, test rigs from scratch — all that required years and tens of millions of dollars. Dallara, a family-owned Italian company that produces chassis for IndyCar, GP2, and many other series, already had everything necessary in its town of Varano de' Melegari in Parma province.
The scheme was geographically elegant: engine and transmission come from Maranello (forty minutes by car), the chassis is assembled at Dallara, aerodynamic development is conducted partly in Kannapolis — and Haas did some of its wind tunnel runs at Ferrari's aero tunnel in Maranello. This circumstance became the second, far sharper front of the complaint: Appendix 8 limits not only tunnel hours but who has the right to spend those hours. The FIA conducted an inspection of the Scuderia's tunnel and established it was operating within the rules and not spending Haas's quota for its own benefit. To an outside observer, all this looked as if the "American" team was physically almost entirely in Italy. And formally, that was true. Haas exploited not a loophole but an architectural feature of the regulations: the rules defined what you had to design yourself, but didn't dictate on whose machine you had to mill it or into whose tunnel you had to stick the model.
Critics — and Force India first and foremost — saw this as diluting the very concept of "constructor." If a team designs the aero and front suspension, and buys or outsources everything else, how is it different from a customer slapping their stickers on someone else's car? The answer, essentially, came down to listed parts: as long as you design what's on the list yourself, you're a constructor. The list was short, but legally bulletproof.
Australian Grand Prix, March 20, 2016, Melbourne. Haas F1 Team's first race in history. Romain Grosjean — an experienced driver who'd come through the Lotus/Enstone school, knew how to extract results from imperfect machinery — qualified only nineteenth: both Haas cars stuck on the penultimate row. The race developed chaotically: the crash involving Fernando Alonso and Esteban Gutiérrez (Haas's own second driver) brought out red flags, shuffling the order. Grosjean made it to sixth place, using the stoppage to switch to the hardest compound and reach the finish without a second pit stop.
For context: Team Manor, which hit the grid in 2010 as Virgin Racing, got its first points only in its fifth season. Caterham (formerly Lotus Racing) scored zero constructors' points in five years of existence. HRT — zero points in three years. Haas scored eight points in one race. Two weeks later, at the Bahrain Grand Prix, Grosjean brought home fifth — another ten points. A rookie team that hadn't built its own factory was beating squads with decades of history in the standings.
What gets me about this episode is one detail: Gutiérrez, Haas's second driver, was involved in the crash that helped his teammate score points. The team simultaneously lost and won on its own debut.
The dispute around Haas exposed a crack running through Formula 1's entire structure. The World Constructors' Championship implies each participant is an engineering entity capable of creating a car. But the sport's economics had long since pushed half the grid into dependence on the "big four" engine manufacturers. Toro Rosso (now RB) used Red Bull components for years. Sauber bought from Ferrari. The difference was in degree: Haas took purchasing to the limit permitted by the rules, and did so demonstratively, from day one.
The eight anti-circumvention measures introduced by the FIA after the stewards' decision in Abu Dhabi essentially became new law for all teams. The six-month quarantine for engineers meant Ferrari couldn't simply "loan" an aerodynamicist to Haas for half a year and get him back with blueprints in his head. The ban on transferring aerodynamic data closed the most obvious channel for intellectual property leakage.
But the real tightening came later and for a different reason. In 2020 Racing Point fielded the RP20 — a car the paddock immediately dubbed the "pink Mercedes." Stewards found it legal but penalized the team 15 points and 400 thousand euros for rear brake ducts designed using Mercedes data. Competitors' protests only subsided after the FIA promised to close the loophole. In the new regulations that took effect in 2021, the list moved from Appendix 6 of the Sporting Regulations to Article 22 of the Technical, the concept itself was renamed "listed team components," and the wording was supplemented with the requirement to own intellectual property on the component — "the complete design and development history." They separately codified a ban on reverse engineering: photogrammetry, point cloud scanning, overlaying CAD on photographs. Outsourcing like the Haas-Dallara scheme remained permitted, but with a condition: the contractor can't be a competitor or an "associated party" of a competitor.
Force India (subsequently renamed Racing Point, then Aston Martin) kept insisting that the Haas model undermined competition. The circle closed with mocking precision: the problem Force India raised in the context of Haas came back to its own successor — and it was precisely its car that became grounds to rewrite the rules.
Now — to the central question. What would have happened if Haas hadn't entered into a technical partnership with Ferrari?
The first and most likely scenario: Haas wouldn't have made it to the grid in 2016 at all. Building their own production base for carbon fiber monocoques, designing a transmission, developing rear suspension — all that requires not only money (Haas's budget was estimated at roughly $100–120 million in the early years, one of the most modest on the grid), but time. Three to four years minimum to reach a level that would at least pass FIA crash tests. Teams HRT, Caterham, and Manor are living examples of what an attempt to enter Formula 1 "from scratch" looks like: chronic resource shortages, cars at the back of the grid, financial collapse after a few seasons.
Second scenario: Haas would have found another supplier, but with less depth of cooperation. Mercedes, Renault, or Honda could have sold an engine and possibly a gearbox. But none of them at that moment offered as comprehensive a package as Ferrari. The Scuderia was unique in its willingness to sell practically everything allowed — partly because it brought revenue, partly because each additional customer strengthened Ferrari's political influence inside Formula 1. Without the "Ferrari package," the Haas car would have been a substantially different machine — and, most likely, substantially slower.
The third — and perhaps most interesting — scenario: if the 2015 regulations hadn't allowed such broad cooperation in principle. Imagine if listed parts had included the gearbox and rear suspension. In that case, the entry ticket to Formula 1 would have cost an order of magnitude more, and the Haas model would have been technically impossible. An American presence in the championship, already fragile (the last full-fledged American team before Haas was USF1, which ended in collapse in 2010 without even making it to the starting grid), could have been postponed another decade. Considering that Liberty Media acquired commercial rights to Formula 1 in January 2017 with clear designs on the American market, Haas's absence from the grid would have deprived the new owners of an important argument.
What strikes me is that this third scenario — a world with a higher barrier to entry — many in the paddock would have considered "correct." Formula 1 as a club for those who build themselves. The catch is, by 2015 that club consisted of eleven teams and risked shrinking to nine.
By 2024 Haas is still in Formula 1. The team survived a change of title sponsors, the split with Russian driver Nikita Mazepin and sponsor Uralkali in 2022, several disastrous seasons — and several surprisingly strong races. Ayao Komatsu became team principal in 2024, replacing Steiner. The cooperation model with Ferrari persisted, though regulations tightened: the list of listed parts expanded, aerodynamic oversight became stricter, the budget cap (introduced in 2021) partly leveled the playing field.
The stewards' decision in Abu Dhabi in November 2015 — document No. 33 — turned out to be a point from which two development lines diverged. One — legalization of the "maximum buyer" model, allowing Haas to exist. The other — gradual tightening of the screws, leading to regulations in which repeating Haas's 2016 path is now significantly harder. The door through which the American team entered didn't close completely — but became noticeably narrower, and the next newcomer, Cadillac, faced an entirely different set of requirements.
It's revealing how this story ended. Andretti's application was rejected in January 2024, and only after the project was reformatted around General Motors and renamed did the FIA and Formula One Management issue final approval — March 7, 2025, confirming an eleventh team on the grid from 2026. Cadillac is building bases in Indiana, North Carolina, Michigan, and Silverstone, hired over two hundred people, and is developing its own power unit. In other words, it's taking the path Haas deliberately bypassed: full cycle, own engine, no reliance on someone else's gearbox. Cadillac has the money and time for that. Haas in 2015 had neither.
The point of this whole story, if you strip away the technical details, is simple. Formula 1 spent nineteen years telling itself you can't buy a car wholesale, but you can assemble it from others' components. Haas took the second to its limit and got eight points in its very first weekend, then eight anti-circumvention clauses thrown in for good measure. The regulations always catch up to reality a season or two late: first they allow, then they explain what they meant. Whoever manages to slip through that gap stays on the grid. Whoever waits for clarifications stays in history.