Team owner labels F1 'really depressing'

Gene Haas has taken a shot at Formula One's competitive balance as the second-year team owner continues to wait for his first podium finish.

Haas sit seventh in the constructors' championship at the summer break, with Romain Grosjean and new recruit Kevin Magnussen picking up 29 points from the first 11 races of the season.

Grosjean's best finish was sixth in Austria, which came one race after Magnussen finished seventh in Azerbaijan.

While the haul is a major improvement on their first campaign last year - they earned 29 points in total in 2016, all courtesy of Grosjean - Gene has already come to the realisation that a title challenge is all but impossible in the near future.

"I think we have two good drivers right now, they've both scored points, the car's very good," the American Haas told Motorsport.com.

"But the real cloud that hangs over us is the fact we’re one to two seconds (per lap) off the fastest cars. And quite frankly we don't understand (how) we can be that far off with what we consider to be state-of-the-art equipment.

"Other than the top three teams, everybody's in that boat. That to me is probably the biggest problem that I see right now, that the top three teams are light years ahead of everybody else.

"They are also the teams that develop their own engines, transmissions and chassis, so there's an inherent advantage in doing that. How do we overcome that? Quite frankly there's no answer to that, which is really depressing."

Haas, who use Ferrari engines and have a partnership with the Italian team, spent an estimated £100 million last season.

Ferrari (£330m), Mercedes (£265m) and Red Bull (£215m) topped the budget list, with only Sauber, Force India and the defunct Manor team making do with less than Haas.

The three richest teams, who each received more than £120m in payments and prize money from Formula One Management, are the only constructors' champions of the last decade.

But with the F1 Group now owned by Liberty Media, hope has been high that change will arrive to give second-tier teams a greater chance of success.

Englishman Ross Brawn has been tasked with reinventing the competition, having made his way back to the circus as motorsport managing director.

With Haas one of a large group of teams always racing for points rather than podiums, Gene Haas is seeking an answer to lift the also-rans up or the best of the best down.

"That's a dilemma that F1 is facing," Haas said.

"You have the teams at the front and then this big mid-pack. We’re all very close together, matter of fact the mid-pack is all within a second.

"So from a competitive standpoint we’re all very equal, it’s just you have this group way out in front that we’re all struggling with.

"The reality of it is, that outside those three teams, nobody has a chance to win. If you’re running sixth through 20th, you really don’t have a chance of winning."