Haas could ‘develop’ drivers for Ferrari

Guether Steiner has Haas are open to developing driver talent for Ferrari, but at the moment there is nothing in the pipeline.

With Haas’ technical partnership with Ferrari, the American is an attractive option for a driver wanting to take a step closer to the Scuderia such as Romain Grosjean.

But it could also be a good starting point for drivers already affliated with Ferrari, giving them a place to hone their talents.

Speaking at Monza, Haas team boss Steiner revealed that they could embrace the latter in the years to come but, at present, nothing is on the table.

He said: “Ferrari helped us out this year to find a driver, because last year we were looking for good drivers and they had one with Esteban [Gutierrez] so we took him.

“In the future, we haven’t spoken about that a lot so if Ferrari has got a good development driver in their stable which they want to bring along and it’s maybe too early to take him into their team, because Ferrari is Ferrari, they don’t want to test a driver, they need to have a finished product there.

“So if they ask us to have him for a year or two, to develop him, why not but at the moment these discussions are not taking place.

“But if there is a good driver in the future, we always talk with Ferrari and we are pretty close to them as everybody knows, for sure.

“It’s similar like Mercedes does maybe with Manor, they’ve got two drivers there at Manor who they developed because they’ve got Mercedes engines, but there is nothing in the pipeline at the moment.”