The Title Sponsor 2019 was a leveller, not just for the team but for me in my role as team principal. In terms of my responsibilities the role was widening as in 2018 I had also become involved in sponsorship. When we started the team Gene had said that he would deal with that side of things, which was fine by me. I knew very little about sponsorship, although I obviously appreciated its importance. What I found slightly strange was that by 2018 we still didn’t have a title sponsor in place at Haas, but as it wasn’t within my remit I simply assumed that Gene was happy with us not having one. It turned out that he had actually hired somebody in the United States to find some sponsors for the team but it hadn’t worked out. Then, in the autumn of 2018, a sponsorship agency got in touch with us in the UK to say that an energy drink company called Rich Energy was interested in becoming our title sponsor. ‘OK,’ said Gene. ‘You speak to them and see what you can do.’ The reason I think this might be interesting to F1 fans, apart from the enormous amount of foking drama it caused, is that people will probably assume that Formula 1 teams have entire departments to deal with things like sponsorship. Today that’s true, although you don’t have to go back very far to find something more akin to what you’d see at a minor league baseball team, Haas being a case in point. As an entity within our team, though, sponsorship had basically lain dormant for the first three years of its existence so we had some catching up to do. All in all I quite enjoyed helping to bring in sponsors, partly because it involved working with people, and partly because helping to get a deal over the line benefited the team. It was pretty cool actually. Or at least some of it was. The CEO of Rich Energy was a man called William Storey, and in October 2018 he came out to visit us at the US Grand Prix. Although none of us had ever heard of Rich Energy before, he was a pretty convincing guy so we took it to the next stage. Bearing in mind the amount of money we were asking for, which was £15 million a year, what we should have done next was hire somebody to do some serious digging on Storey and the company, but at the time we were still knee-deep in the disqualification appeal. We did get somebody to do some due diligence, however, and as far as I know it all checked out. We ended up signing a multi-year deal with Rich Energy worth £15 million a year at the end of 2018, and in January 2019 we announced the partnership to the world at the unveiling of the new car. This took place at the RAC Club in London and I don’t mind admitting that I felt a little bit out of place there. It’s seriously foking posh. I also got lost several times so once I found the car and the drivers I didn’t move very far. The first time I smelled a rat with Rich Energy was when I couldn’t find anybody who had ever tried the drink before. We ended up having it in the motorhome during some Grand Prix weekends but as far as I know it wasn’t available in any supermarkets. In fact there were even rumours circulating before the start of the season, so I was later told, that the drink didn’t exist. What makes this even stranger is that at the launch event Storey told the press that he intended Rich Energy to become the market leader and beat Red Bull ‘on and off the track’. What, with an invisible foking drink? That’s a big ambition. I was later told that at the time he started talking to us Storey had already agreed a deal in principle with Williams to become their title sponsor and was supposed to have met up with Claire Williams in Austin. He had arranged to meet Claire and her representatives at a restaurant there but didn’t turn up as he was talking to us. The story gets even better, though, as before they approached Williams, Rich Energy claimed to have made an offer to save the Force India team that had just gone into administration. According to ESPN, Storey was not considered a viable long-term owner of the team so Rich Energy’s offer was dismissed, prompting Force India to be placed in administration. Lawrence Stroll then came to their rescue, repackaged the team as Racing Point, turned it into Aston Martin, and it’s all been downhill ever since. The next rat came in the form of a request from Rich Energy before the Canadian Grand Prix for us to remove part of their logo from all the branding. I later found out that this was because a company called Whyte Bikes had taken Rich Energy to court claiming that they had stolen the Whyte Bikes logo, which was a deer’s head. I looked at both and they were strikingly similar. As well as ordering Rich Energy to remove the offending logo from all their branding and pay Whyte Bikes over £30,000, the judge stated that Storey had been an unreliable witness. Had I been made aware of the circumstances behind us having to remove somebody else’s antlers from our livery at the time, alarm bells would have rung and I would have done something about it. As it was, I wasn’t, and so we just agreed to their request. Incidentally, the entire Rich Energy debacle became the subject of an episode of Drive to Survive, and having been told all about it by Stuart Morrison I have to tell you now that some of the things that are said in that episode are just bullshit, starting with a claim by Storey at the start of our relationship that he had put up a personal guarantee of £35 million. Knowing what I know now, I’m not sure he had £35, let alone £35 million. It’s safe to say that the start of the 2019 season did not go well for us, and by race nine, which was Austria, we had had just four points finishes. There were various reasons for this which I’ll come on to in a moment, but on the Wednesday before race ten, which was Silverstone, Rich Energy posted a tweet claiming that they had terminated their deal with us with immediate effect due to ‘poor on-track performances’, as well as something about the attitude in F1 being too PC. ‘I take it they haven’t terminated the deal,’ Stuart Morrison said to me on spotting the tweet. ‘Of course not. If they had I’d have told you and we’d have prepared a statement.’ ‘We’re probably going to have to do that anyway as the press will want to know what’s going on.’ Sure enough, the press were on to us like a flash and we told them that as far as we were concerned Rich Energy were still the title sponsor of Haas F1. They’d paid the first half of the season in advance and were still in credit, although only just. The following day the newspapers were full of it and some of the quotes from Storey were bizarre to say the least. In the Sun newspaper he likened our car to a milk float and then somebody – we don’t know who, it might have been him – tweeted the same thing during the Grand Prix, even including a photograph of a milk float with Storey as the driver. ‘What a foking weirdo,’ I said when Stuart showed me this. ‘This guy should be in hospital. He needs help.’ Things became a bit clearer directly after the British Grand Prix when we were informed by a board member at Rich Energy that an internal struggle was taking place and as such they apologized for what had happened. The board were keen to continue the partnership and asked us to release the following statement on their behalf: We wholeheartedly believe in the Haas F1 Team, its performance, and the organization as a whole and we are fully committed to the current sponsorship agreement in place. We also completely believe in the product of Formula 1 and the platform it offers our brand. Clearly the rogue actions of one individual have caused great embarrassment. We are in the process of legally removing the individual from all executive responsibilities. They may speak for themselves but their views are not those of the company. We wish to confirm our commitment to the Haas F1 Team, Formula 1, and to thank the Haas F1 Team for their support and patience whilst this matter is dealt with internally. Soon after that I became bored with all of the bullshit, and to cut a long story slightly shorter, and despite what Storey said on Drive to Survive which again is bullshit, we ended up terminating the agreement and so in September we removed their branding from the cars, the wagons and the motorhome and just tried to forget about them. In my opinion the whole thing was just a vanity project for a snake oil salesman and unfortunately we got duped. In terms of how much hassle this created, working with Rich Energy was a pretty expensive lesson, but because of the things we learned it put us in good stead going forward. Also, we got £7.5 million, which wasn’t too bad. The fiasco with Rich Energy notwithstanding, the idea of having more external sponsors at Haas and me being partly responsible for negotiating and schmoozing them turned out to be the proverbial double-edged sword as it seemed like the more money we brought in, the less there was to spend. Unfortunately things were about to get a lot worse. From Guenther Steiner, unfiltered.
