Steiner on Australia: “You can’t expect everybody to be on the same page”

Haas F1 team boss Gunther Steiner says “you can’t expect everybody to be on the same page” after clashing opinions during initial discussions about the cancellation of the Australian Grand Prix.

Last Thursday evening team bosses met with Ross Brawn to discuss whether the race in Melbourne should go ahead after McLaren’s withdrawal following a team member testing positive for Covid-19.
 
Ferrari led the decision to cancel the race with Alfa Romeo and Renault agreeing, while other teams were prepared to still run on the Friday and then make a decision.
 
But Mercedes, Haas and Williams then opted for it to be cancelled, leaving Red Bull, AlphaTauri and Racing Point in favour of the race going ahead.
 
But Steiner wasn’t surprised by the opinion’s others had during the debate.
 
“It’s normal,” Steiner told Motorsport.com. “Each team is structured differently.

“Some are part of a big corporation, some are privately owned, you cannot expect that everybody’s on the same page here.
 
“We need to make it as safe as possible. It’s easy now with hindsight to know everything better, but it takes a lot of moving parts to come to a decision like this.
 
“You’ve got a lot of parties involved, you’ve got a local promoter, you’ve got F1, you’ve got the FIA, you’ve got 10 teams with different backgrounds, they’re from different countries, so everybody’s got his own little problem to deal with.

"We need to find a compromise, and in the end this was the compromise that came out.”

Four members of Haas were tested for coronavirus having initially showed symptoms but the results proved negative.

“I think we were very conscious of it," said Steiner. "We said to everybody, if you don’t feel well, we want to bring it up, because there’s no point to be the people that spread it.

“We had four of them, they all came back negative, thank god. We were waiting anxiously to get the results, and all was good for us.

“McLaren had one case and I think they acted very consciously and in a good way, and made sure they were safe.”