After Surviving to Drive, the next Guenther book can’t come soon enough, especially when he got sacked. Was it everything I hoped for? Well, given that I’d happily listen to the man explain the recipe of toast, I don’t think I had very big expectations other than just him telling his perspective in his usual way, and as he did that, I think this one deserves the 5 stars. I have looked up my review on the first book, and I also wished for more rally stories and more Lauda stories – the second of these wishes got granted!!
The subtitle is My Incredible Decade in Formula One, and even though Guenther worked for Jaguar as well, it is only touched upon, and basically focuses on the history of the Haas team. While Surviving to Drive was a chronicle of what happened in the 2022 season, as it happened, Unfiltered zooms back out and tells stories with the advantage of hindsight.
After a short introduction of who Guenther is and his background, we jump straight into the story of Haas: the idea phase, the finding an investor, getting a license, setting up the team, then a year by year review from 2016 to 2023, up until the day Guether was let go. At some places, there are some chapters inserted called pitstop, where Guenther just wanted to talk about a topic (like rivalries or egos or the FIA), but it didn’t really fit anywhere, so he just made a pitstop for it.
What surprises me (once again, just like at the booktour event), how much Guenther is committed to not shittalk anybody. Not even the Mazepins, not even Gene Haas (even though, in my opinion at least the latter one would deserve it). At the end of the book, he reflects on how he is a people person, and I think it is a part of that – being able to really connect – it makes you less inclined to say bad things about others.
To me, this book was enlightening – I got into F1 a year ago, so had I been in it longer, and lived through the things it recounts, I would probably have had more insights, but this way, it really made a lot of things clear for me. What was the most interesting, and Guenther says that he got tired of hiding things from smart people, and now he is relieved that he doesn’t have to (at this point he was talking about how some things were handled by Gene).
Guenther stayed factual, and mentioned several times that Gene probably had his reasons for doing (or not doing) things, but I also have my reasons to call bullshit. What hit me the hardest was how Covid was handled. Looking through the lens of Drive to Survive (I rely heavily on that narrative as I have not lived through it), what I saw was that Haas had sucked from 2020, and hasn’t really shown too much potential up until recent times. I simply thought that they were a bad team (partly because they were small and relatively new) and that was all (I still liked them, though).
But reality was that they hadn’t gotten any money from Gene during Covid (I understand on a rational level that a team that is not racing is not worth a lot, but you are responsible for that team dammit!). They obviously had to use the same car in 2021 that they had in 2020 (with the compulsory modifications), but they could literally not change anything else about it. Of course, they sucked!! And one part of that is the lack of resources, but the other is what kind of morale this could have generated!
Then came the Mazepins, but I will not spoil the whole book – I couldn’t anyway, because you also read it for the style, not just the content. I think it was a great book, I probably enjoyed it more than the first one, but only because it was more reflective and hindsight seriously gave it a lot of extra.
As Guenther mentions at the beginning of the book, there aren’t a lot of people who can say that they have set up a Formula 1 team, let alone one that didn’t go out of business pretty soon after its birth. He did it, and even though it is obvious that even if he is not happy, at least he is relieved that he is not the team principal anymore, I think it is a shame that someone who is just giving the money (or sometimes doesn’t) can fire someone, who is literally the bearer of that team. But this is the world of F1.
So go and give it a read! Let me know if you liked this one better than the previous!
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