How “boring” tweaks yielded crucial gains for Haas

There was a slight discrepancy between the look and the words. “I am very, very happy,” Ayao Komatsu assured the media on the evening after the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. Though he seemed rather tired and somewhat disappointed instead, as he leaned back in his chair with his arms crossed over his chest.

Led by Komatsu, the team overachieved in 2024. After finishing 10th the year before, even the goal Gene Haas had set for the team to finish eighth seemed unrealistic to many, including Komatsu himself. But from his “we expect to be last” comment at the start of the year in Bahrain, Haas made it all the way to a narrow loss to Alpine in the battle for sixth at the end.

Even at seventh, Haas can boast of being the team with the biggest year-on-year improvement in championship position, alongside McLaren. Yet letting Alpine snatch sixth place at the end was still a bit of a bitter pill to swallow.

“I think it’s very, very good we are disappointed not to get P6,” Komatsu said when the inevitable question followed. “At the beginning of the season, our official target was P8. Again, stating the obvious, to be P8 you need to beat two teams. You know, I really was thinking [at the start of the year], who can we beat? What two teams are we going to beat, coming from the disaster of last year?

“But then, I think we just showed this year, even though we are the smallest team by far, if we work as a team together, we can do this, which is something to be really proud of, for everybody in the team.

“You’ve got to look at it in a sense that if somebody told us that we’re going to finish P7 this year, we’d have all signed it off at the start of the year. But of course, the bar has raised.”

It’s not Haas’ best constructors’ position on paper either. In 2018, it climbed as high as P5 in the overall standings, but that was also helped by Force India going into administration mid-season and its successor Racing Point not being able to inherit the points throughout the process. Haas’ real position that year was one down. Seventh place in 2024, however, looks more impressive – not only because the state of F1 as a whole is now better and fewer teams struggle, but also because of the way that P7 was achieved.

For the first time in its history, Haas has managed not only to stay competitive throughout the year, but to outpace its rivals in development – which is all the more impressive given the way the team is set up. Delivering upgrades is still a bigger challenge for Haas than for most other teams: as the team relies primarily on suppliers to produce parts, the journey from the design office to the track for those parts is longer – and more expensive, too.

But it was in the final series of races that Haas looked the strongest all year. The most remarkable stat about Haas’ season is that the team scored points in eight of the last nine rounds of the championship, which is quite an accomplishment for a team that has never before scored most of its points in the second half of the year.

“If you look at the number of points we scored in each quarter of the season: last quarter we scored the most points,” Komatsu doubled down. “Then the fact that we can put upgrades on the car, can make the car go faster…

It would be wrong to suggest that the team’s season would have been drastically different had Steiner’s contract been renewed. But it was under Komatsu’s watch that the car got quicker and quicker with every single upgrade

“In this Abu Dhabi qualifying, to have that gap to pole that was three-tenths, no? That was incredible. So it’s really good that we proved that we can improve the car, develop the car in the correct way if we work together as a team, and communicate.”

It’s probably this – the pace of development that Haas was able to maintain in 2024 – that Komatsu can certainly count among his achievements. The fact that the VF-24 was freed from the tyre management flaws of its predecessor was undoubtedly one of the cornerstones of Haas’ improved performance last year.

However, this car was still developed under the supervision of Simone Resta and with Steiner as team principal. And it would be wrong to suggest that the team’s season would have been drastically different had Steiner’s contract been renewed. But it was under Komatsu’s watch that the car got quicker and quicker with every single upgrade.

Perhaps the Japanese manager, with his engineering background, was simply better equipped to understand and address the main shortcomings in Haas’ relatively complicated structure, with multiple bases in Italy and the UK. Improved communication between these sites – cited by Haas drivers and new technical director Andrea De Zordo as one of Komatsu’s main achievements – doesn’t sound particularly exciting, but it probably does make a noticeable difference.

Initial development of the 2024 car was overseen on Steiner’s watch, but Komatsu’s appointment helped the team to continue progressing during the year

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

After all, there weren’t too many other changes. After parting ways with Steiner and Resta, Haas didn’t really make any high-profile hires. The people stayed the same, so it must have been something about the way they worked together that Komatsu was able to unlock.

“Honestly, there’s no magic,” he said when asked about what changes he has brought to the team. “I’m sorry for [telling] a boring story, but it’s nothing exciting. It’s [about] doing the basics very, very, very well, and work as a team. [And] this is what can happen.”

The most important victory for Komatsu was the restoration of trust between Gene Haas and his own team, which had clearly been damaged by the end of 2023. “Gene has the money,” was a phrase Komatsu repeated several times during his media sessions, and it was up to him to prove to his boss that the investments were paying off.

By negotiating better deals with suppliers and proving that every upgrade – which in F1 always involves a seven-figure outlay – does what it’s supposed to, he got Gene to open his chequebook again and again throughout the year. This renewed trust, combined with a seventh place in the constructors’ championship, has brought Haas much closer to reaching the budget cap in 2025. Something that has also never happened before.

It’s already been confirmed that the team will also be getting a new motorhome next year to replace the one that’s been in use since 2016. That doesn’t sound particularly exciting either, but it isn’t a small investment – worth the value of a big performance upgrade. And it’s little things like this that help teams develop and grow since working conditions can be a deciding factor for potential recruits.

Haas, with its relatively modest base at Banbury, is competing with the likes of Aston Martin and its swanky new factory at Silverstone. For a team that needs to grow, addressing these areas is essential. Last year Haas went from 230 to around 250 employees – and Komatsu is adamant that the process must continue.

“We are trying to grow,” he explained. “Finding good people is not easy. But there’s no doubt that we have to grow. We [are] below the critical mass, if you like.

Haas remains smaller than rival squads despite efforts to expand

Photo by: Dom Romney / Motorsport Images

“We’re just about saturated all the time – when something happens, we’re completely overflowing. So it’s not sustainable. I want to make this team sustainable. At the moment I feel we’ve got very, very little margin. So yes, we’re recruiting and if you go to our website you can see how many positions we’re recruiting for. Feel free to apply…

“Some positions we actually find good people. Some positions it’s really hard. So, you know, things like our own track results, the message we’re putting out there that we’re a serious race team – that helps.

“But again, the interesting thing is that we get people coming in from much bigger teams like Mercedes and Red Bull. It depends on what those individuals are looking for. We’re a much smaller team, so it’s hard work. You have to do a lot more. But some things are better, right?

Komatsu is almost the anti-Steiner in many ways. But a year at the helm has been enough for him to prove that he’s probably the best leader the team needs at this moment in its history

“If you’re someone who just wants to be given ‘this is your job, you have to do it as well as you can, and we’re a race-winning team’ – if that’s what they want, then they’ll go for the big team. But if they want to have, I don’t know, a bigger overview, to be more multi-tasking… It depends on the personality. So again, we have to attract the right personality that fits into the organisation.”

It’s hard to argue that the team wouldn’t be where it is today without Steiner. It was his business sense and management skills that allowed Haas not only to enter F1, but to survive the COVID years – a task that Komatsu, with his very different skill set, may not have been able to accomplish. It was Steiner who pulled off the deals with Mick Schumacher and Nikita Mazepin to keep the team on the grid in 2021, and it’s also him who brought MoneyGram on board later on.

Komatsu is almost the anti-Steiner in many ways. He probably won’t get as much screen time in season seven of Drive to Survive, either. But a year at the helm has been enough for him to prove that he’s probably the best leader the team needs at this moment in its history.

He may need to continue to develop in some areas, but while he probably wouldn’t have been able to secure a partner like MoneyGram, he certainly deserves credit for forging a partnership with Toyota Gazoo Racing – which, along with financial benefits, has the potential to address some of Haas’ inherent structural weaknesses. Even if this process will definitely require a lot more time.

Komatsu is realistic to recognise that Toyota partnership will take time to reap fruit

Photo by: Lubomir Asenov / Motorsport Images

“At the moment, we are in the very early stages of actually setting up the project,” Komatsu said in Abu Dhabi about Toyota. “So it’s actually a dip because we haven’t increased our number of people yet, but we have to set up the project, right? So people are working more.

“It’s nowhere near the stage where we can feel any benefit. In fact, we are even more stretched at this minute. That’s a dip stage, which is normal. So we just need to get out of that dip stage and onto the stage where we can stabilise it, but that’s going to take several months. To feel the effect on the track, it’s going to take at least a year.”

All this doesn’t mean that 2025 will be a success. Haas certainly benefited from its rivals’ struggles last year, whether it was Williams’ battle with Excel spreadsheets or Sauber’s management woes. Even repeating P7 will be a big challenge.

Komatsu will also be relying on an entirely new driver line-up – one of his own choosing this time. Last year’s success wouldn’t have been possible without Nico Hulkenberg, who seems to be enjoying his “third youth”. If not for some of the German’s standout performances, Haas could easily have finished eighth.

It was Steiner, again, who brought the Hulk into the team after a three-year break from F1. But it’s Komatsu who got the best out of him last year, as he has tried to do with every other member of still by far the smallest team on the F1 grid.

“Honestly, there’s nothing better than seeing those people happy,” he said of his personal highlight. “I’m just disappointed because the car [was] so quick… I just feel like I let down our aero guys, the designers, the guys who worked on production and everything to get this car on the track – I just felt this car deserved P6 and I couldn’t deliver.

“I feel like I let those people down. That’s the part that’s disappointing. But at the same time, you look at these guys, they are happy. Of course they’re disappointed, but they’re thinking, well, we’ve still had an amazing season, which is true. So yeah, it’s a bit mixed [feeling], but I think overall we should be proud of ourselves.”

And what about Gene?

“Well, Gene… right after the race he sent me a message. I’m not bullshitting you, straight away he said, ‘Congratulations on a very successful year for the team.’ Just that. So I called him to thank him. He’s the first person to be disappointed that he didn’t get P6, but when I called him, the first thing he said was – no ‘disappointment’, nothing – just ‘congratulations’. ‘Really, amazing job’. ‘So much better than last year’. ‘We got P7, really happy’. And that’s nice.”

With an all-new line-up of Bearman and Ocon, can Haas build on its impressive 2024?

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images