Guenther Steiner says he still does not know what Gene Haas wants from the Formula 1 team they formed together in 2016 and has suggested the American businessman has "maybe lost interest in the sport."
Steiner, one of the stars of Formula 1's Netflix series 'Drive to Survive,' left his role as Haas team principal in January 2024 after falling out over their vastly different visions for the race team.
Haas has not scored a podium or a win in its decade in the sport and has struggled to break out of the lower midfield.
The team finished fifth in the championship in 2018, but otherwise has never finished higher than seventh.
Speaking on the High Performance Podcast, Steiner suggested his former boss does not know or understand what he needs to make the team successful.
"With Gene Haas, you'd need to have him here on your podcast to ask him what he wanted to do [with the team] because I still haven't understood," Steiner said.
"Being in a sport, for me being somewhere competitive, I want to be a winner. That is what I aim for.. Only one can achieve it, I'm fully aware of that, you know, but you make the maximum effort, not just [aim] to be a participant. It's the same in life - you don't just want to be a participant, you want to be a part of life, you want to enjoy yourself.
"In the beginning there was a clear plan - it's difficult to get into F1, as we now can see with Cadillac it's not easy. We had success pretty early, we then had a few bad years as well, you know, 2019, but that's normal in a sport, you cannot have always good years. You are competing with the best of the best and at some stage, I don't know, maybe he lost interest in the sport, maybe he thought it should be done different, and the relationship just deteriorated I would say, over time."
Steiner regrets how long it took to leave Haas.
He says had become clear to him the team did not have the ambition needed to break out from the midfield and set their sights on challenging for podiums.
"I think I stayed two years too long," Steiner said. "What I should have done differently is to sell the ownership my vision differently. That's what I should have done."
When probed on when he started falling out of love with the Haas job, he said: "End of '22, '23, because I could see where the other teams are going. I could see, to be successful, what needs to be done, and I couldn't get that across. Again, it's my fault not getting it across maybe, but I tried to say, 'This is what we need to do to be successful in the future.'
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"When you're not working in F1, people sometimes don't understand when you are doing something [for] seven, eight years to get a point in F1. I've done that, I want a podium. If I don't have the opportunity to go for something better... I mean, I don't want to fight every year for the same thing like the team is doing at the moment. They fight for the same thing, to get a point. Yeah, I've tried to get points for 10 years to finish seventh, eighth, sixth, ninth, 10th. It's like you need to put yourself in a place to say, 'I want to reach the podium.'
"If you're ambitious in life, that is what you want to do. Will I ever reach the podium with what I've got? No. And if you don't believe anymore in it and you're not happy just to get a point on the weekend, then you need to change. And that's why I said for me it was good to change."