What Watching ‘F1: Drive to Survive’ Tells Us About Outdated Management Styles
“It’s not going to f***ing get better,” says Guenther Steiner in the second episode of the second series of Netflix’s fly-on-the-wall look at the inside of Formula One motor racing, Drive to Survive. “It’s not a wound, it doesn’t heal itself.” Steiner, a German-Italian of such boiling rage through the majority of his filmed work that he often appears on the verge of turning into Basil Fawlty and giving his Haas F1 team’s cars a damn good thrashing with a tree branch, was talking to Romain Grosjean, the focus of much of his ire through the episode.
Steiner was a minor figure on F1 fans’ radars prior to the airing of the first series of Drive to Survive, having run Ford’s race engine programme in the 2000s, and then Jaguar Racing for a short time. For much of his first spell in F1, Steiner was known to fans only through profiles in specialist magazines, which routinely referred to him as “one of the sport’s characters” or similar. This definition of “character”, in that it clearly encompasses someone whose world-view is reinforced by the language of confrontation and by jokes that never punch any way but down, says more about F1 journalism of 20 years ago than it does about Steiner himself.
We watch as the team principal navigates a dismal season for his team on-track, while also having…
