F1: Haas still confident his team will prove F1 start-ups can work

Despite the recent record of failure of start-up Formula 1 teams, Gene Haas remains confident that his Charlotte-based team, scheduled to debut in 2016, is better positioned to succeed than bankrupt HRT, Caterham and Marussia.

"I think their biggest problem was trying to get to the grid so fast," argued Haas of the failed "new" teams in an interview with CNN (see video below). "For us, we want to make sure that before the cars come for practice in January 2016, we will have that chassis hopefully completely assembled by November.

"We will spend a fair amount of time making sure we have the right spares, the right pit equipment, the right logistics, the right containers – all the right things that takes us to get to the race."

Tthe 61-year-old founder of Haas Automation and NASCAR team owner with Tony Stewart, says the knock-on benefits for his billion dollar machine tool manufacturing business will be well worth the huge expense of creating and operating an F1 team.

"If I can achieve an extra billion in sales, we will pay for whatever F1 costs," Haas argued. "Some teams spend half a billion, some spend 50 million dollars a year – We should be somewhere in the middle of that."