New American F1 outfit Haas have held talks with 10 drivers over the two seats at their team for 2016 and hope to make a decision on their line-up by September.
Haas F1, owned by businessman Gene Haas, will become the 11th team on the grid next season and are entering the sport in a technical partnership with Ferrari, who will supply their power unit and gearbox.
With seven months to go until the start of 2016 pre-season testing, attention has increasingly turned to the two drivers Haas will field in their debut season, with a host of well-known names linked to the seats.
Ferrari test drivers Esteban Gutierrez and Jean-Eric Vergne have been the most strongly mooted due to Haas’ ties to the Scuderia, while Force India’s highly-rated Nico Hulkenberg is thought to be the team’s top target. American Alex Rossi, the GP2 front-runner and former Caterham and Marussia test driver, is also in the frame.
Haas team principal Guenther Steiner has revealed they have spoken to a host of "interesting candidates", and that while it’s not completely clear yet who is on the market for 2016, says they are aiming to seal a deal for their first driver in the next month.
“We are talking with about 10 people,” Steiner told Haas' YouTube channel. “Some are higher up the list, some are lower, but we also want to see who is out there.
“It’s difficult to find out who is actually available because it hasn’t been decided who is going where yet. So everybody is talking, but it’s not only talking from our side, the people who are talking back to us, they try to sound out what would be available. So it’s a little bit of getting in touch with people. Most of them we know anyway from before or we meet them now.
“I think we will make a decision, or we would like to make a decision, by the end of summer. Then we can be prepared for the driver, the car needs to fit the driver, we’ve got time to tell our drivers what we are doing because we are new. He needs to help us as well – what do you want from us?
“By September I hope we have got the decision for at least one, ideally two. But we have got interesting candidates which is nice for us, which have got a good reputation who talk to us seriously. I hope we can pull some of them off.”
Team founder Haas has made clear in the past he would like to field a driver line-up which blends experience with youth, which makes their apparent courting of Hulkenberg all the more understandable.
Steiner, a former F1 technical director at Jaguar and Red Bull, says a seasoned F1 campaigner would be a major asset for the start-up team.
“Experience and speed as always – that is very important for us," he said. "But experience for sure is very important.
"We are a new team, we need to be self-conscious and we need some known quantities. Everything else is new. The whole team is put together with new people with the first car we make. It’s a lot of unknowns so we need a known quantity in there which can tell us ‘hey guys, I think the car is good, but this part of the car doesn’t work’ or ‘the team works well, I’ve got a good relationship with my race engineers, but the car isn’t good’.
"So we need somebody where we can see where we are at. So we need experience, and if the experience is coming with speed, even better."
Haas F1 are basing themselves across two different sites, with a U.S. base at the company's existing premises in North Carolina and a European headquarters are Marussia's former factory in Banbury.