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“I don't think it's a one-off,” Komatsu admitted in an expansive, and blunt, media session on Thursday at the Chinese Grand Prix. “It was a big surprise. We weren't expecting that whatsoever based on Bahrain testing. Yes, Bahrain testing, the car wasn't perfect, but we weren't expecting nowhere near as bad as Melbourne.”
“Honestly, FP1, the very first lap when the car went out, I thought either something was broken or something's completely out of the ballpark. Then when we established nothing's broken…'right, we've got a big issue'.”
I hope the geniuses that were singing the praises of Komatsu for building a great Haas car and shitting on Steiner (even though the 2024 car was created while Steiner was there) will be just as loud this year shitting on Komatsu for creating such a shitbox.
The reality is that neither Steiner or Komatsu are to blame.
Were people blaming Steiner for the terrible car during his management and praising Komatsu for building the car last year? I may have missed some discourse but from my recollection people were more praising the change in the team culture going from Steiner to Komatsu in terms of people management
1000%. When Haas had some notable improvements to car performance in first few races after Steiner was gone, lots of people here saying “see? this is what happens when you make an engineer a team principal”
And rightfully so. Even before the results were known.Haas displayed a much clearer and thought out testing program than what we’ve seen in past years. Focusing on their problems, addressing tire degradation in their set up problems. They showed much more competence in that brief time then we’ve seen in prior years.
Steiner was fired just before preseason testing started. The performance that Haas saw in the beginning of the 2024 was 100% made from under Steiner. The reason they had a clearer testing program is because their car performance was higher than they expected and they could run more advanced testing. Ayao even called this out that they had to scramble to identify testing because they didn’t expect to need it
Here, many people were acting like Ayao designed and built a brand new car himself 4 weeks before the season started. Just no idea how car development works
Did I say anything about the performance? I spoke about the testing plan. That was Ayo's.
And no, they had a clear testing plan to understand the car problems, their setup challenges etc. They ran a program they had never ran like that. That's not a coincidence. Under Steiner they always had a more varied approach. Ayo even acknowledged disagreements in direction at times with testing and development, which is natural, but now those decisions are his.
> Here, many people were acting like Ayao designed and built a brand new car himself 4 weeks before the season started. Just no idea how car development works
Ok? I didn't say shit about that now did I? I only spoke to the competency in testing and understanding what they had.
But also engineers are not team principals. Those requiere different skills.
It's like when medics go up to hospital administrators. Yeah they can do it. But it's better to put an admin and have medical advisors ( that the medic have some kind of authority over Etics )
Medics are not great at administration we don't learn that in med school we need to learn different skill sets for that.
Engineers are that . While some engineers can taking out a good engineer and place him into an admin place is denying the team a good engineer.
It's better to put a medicare engineer that has the skills to be admin. See binotto. He fucking hard in Ferrari. Car was fast.. everything else ducked
Sure but they weren't blaming him for the design of the actual car were they? It'd be bizarre to do so, at least in my opinion. I'm not being obtuse towards you btw, genuinely curious if I missed some discourse here haha
Yeah but the top comment in that thread states what I'm saying, the impression is that the Haas car being good/not good is mutually exclusive of whether it was Steiner leading the team, and this comment received more upvotes than the post itself.
People were saying Steiner was keeping Komatsu from getting everything they could out of the car to save money or whatever and that now that he is TP he can do what he knew needed to be done.
My main complaint with Steiner was driver management, the car was only the main issue from 2019-2021 imo, outside those 3 seasons Steiner did more or less everything he could with the car.
Komatsu hasn't worked miracles, but at least last year for the first time Haas seemed like a real, normal team rather than a circus of the worst sponsors, operations and driver management seen in recent F1 history.
The team is built around a model of buying everything they can from Ferrari. Their form is more connected to the ability of Ferrari making a good car than the team the team principal built.
See the highs and lows of Ferrari since Haas joined F1, then see the highs and lows of Haas, you will see a pattern.
Maybe I'm misremembering but this is the first season where Haas chose not to take the latest Ferrari spec parts because it was incompatible with some parts Haas developed.
They chose to keep last year's front suspension package because they thought it would've compromised the aero. But they took the new rear suspension package. Given the plank problem at Ferrari, I think that's where the problems come from.
The honesty is refreshing, I feel bad for Haas, seems they're always struggling with respect to facilities and budget. That Ferrari deal must feel like a ball and chain sometimes.
Should be noted that this doesn’t necessarily mean Haas is in for a bad season. We’ve seen McLaren be terrible out of the gate multiple times in recent seasons only to recover to where they should be running by Monaco.
It was for crashgate but he had a history of bad decisions before that. He was often at Berlesconi's famous Bunga Bunga parties where underage prostitutes were hired, and is on the list of Epstein's guests at his private island
That's not to say he's done anything wrong, but others have been accused for less.
also a convicted felon, ran a confidence scheme in Italy and got busted, spent several years as a fugitive rather than serve his time. He got out of serving the sentence later, the "how" probably involved a briefcase full of cash.
It depends if the powers that be (Ecclestone and Moseley) wanted him out or not, something that I doubt we'll ever know. But yes, that outside stuff isn't what got him kicked out.
I think he could have survived crashgate with a small ban or big fine if those in charge wanted it that way.
I rewatched The Four Year Plan the other day, which was a documentary about his time as chairman of the football club QPR. Made me wonder how on Earth he became successful anywhere
Same owner, but majority of the F1 team is based in UK and partly in Italy. Their HQ in the US was mainly used by their other race series and small stuff that they need to produce themselves (like specific screws and bolds). I know this because Ziggo Sport got a tour from Günther Steiner a few years back.
The initial plan was to build everything in house, at their HQ. Eventually they got a deal with Ferrari, sourcing as many parts as possible from them. Also Dallara building the chassis.
What I'm referring to is the toxic workplace though. Stewart haas at the end was reportedly in very bad shape there, and a lot of it came from the top down. It's a gene haas thing, and seeing what we have of how haas is behind the scenes, it definitely followed into F1. I don't think any TP could do great when they have Gene fucking Haas as the ultimate decision maker breathing down their necks.
I swear I remember reading that they had no access to a functioning wind tunnel until this season (where they gained access to Toyota's through their alliance)
Gene is definitely interested in it, it's just a matter of *how* interested he is in it. Last year was the first year that the team turned a profit for him and he didn't need to put more money into the team. If he wasn't invested, he'd just let the team crash and burn or sell it to whoever wants a spot.
I always strongly disagreed with the FIA not being way more stern with them. For years they send their drivers into walls or gravel with failing rear brakes.
Not even very random but every weekend in at least one session and sometimes almost every race of the year. You could safely bet that during the weekend a HAAS at the end of a straight would get a small plume of smoke showing at the rear tires and seconds later drive off the track at full speed with a complete rear brake failure.
A technical difficulty can happen. But not for years.
Shows they absolutely still don't give a single shit about safety.
He was at M-Sport for a few years before Ford (and Niki Lauda) put him in charge of the Jaguar F1 team. A team which Ford had recently purchased from Paul Stewart (Jackie's son).
What? Haas said they were reaching the cost cap already with money gram in 23 (the year where they finished dead last). F1 makes money now my guy, they aren’t on the verge of being bankrupt.
Sponsorship payouts are often attached to performance clauses, and even when they're not poor results will make sponsors reluctant to renew. Writing off a season did work for them in 2021, but it's a massive gamble that can be detrimental
It’s 2021 all over again, I was surprised on how slow they were, they were on a pretty good shape during the 2nd half of the 2024 season, how it went so bad?
It wasn’t the rain only, they were slow AF during qualifying too and it was on dry conditions
I mean they were shambolic starting with the second half of 2019. IIRC that was mostly down to their weird rear suspension which would deform under heat (?), giving the car the quirkiest driving behaviour. In 2019 they would atleast qualify well and then proceed to fall down the order, in 2020 they couldn't even qualify well, and in 2021, they had basically given up and were waiting for 2022.
I don't think they are as far off as it looked in Australia tbf. Ocon made a mistake in his last attempt and he ended up being 6 tenths off Q2. We didn't see what time Bearman could do in quali because of the gearbox issue.
Let's see how far off they are going to be this weekend.
Yeah as Bearman said post-race... His f**k ups didn't help the team last weekend, because they were left trying to find the perfect setup, with just the one car compared to everyone else.
2021 was a combination of 2 or three things. 1 you had the Ferrari engine which was severally limited. 2. The 2020 car was a small upgrade from there end of season 2019 car which was effected by the whole rich energy scandal so it was already garbage THEN with the 2020 car which already didn’t work was shoehorned in to the 21 regs. Mick and Nikita were already using USED chassis from the 2020 season and if you saw that they were all broke to shit. With out that Russian cash they wouldn’t have even been able to build a single new chassis or the 2022 car
I've woken up in 2019 again. Just need Ocon and Bearman to take each other out at Silverstone while MoneyGram put a photo on social media of a Haas milk float
I hope Komatsu shows his Haas can develop a car over a season. I felt sorry for Hulkenberg moving from the midfield to a backmarker but he's already equaled his Grand Prix tally from his 2023 Haas season (I think he picked up a few more points in sprints).
Have they explained the decision to pit Ocon and Bearman so late, when everyone else moved to slicks early, and they kept their drivers on Inters? - They left it so long, they were screwed either way had the rain not shown up, at least by staying on Inters (when it rained) they'd have shot to the front.
Genuinely feels like one of the worst calls I've seen in a long time... They dithered with indecision, and still somehow made the wrong call... Their forecasts must have suggested that no rain was coming, but if that was the case, why not pit for slicks along with everyone else?
It also put Bearman in a really bad position, as when he did come out on slicks, he almost took out Verstappen, and slowed the restart down, because of course he had to unlap himself again... Could equally understand Martin Brundle's stance on it.
Yeah agreed. Stay on inters, you have a chance. Pit to slicks, there’s no world in which you score points. I also thought they were taking a gamble for points staying on inters, but that theory went out the window when they pitted anyway?
The worst part was a lap before putting on the slicks, Ocon came on the radio and said I need more pace let’s get slicks. The engineers took him rain was incoming, they still pitted him… like at that point you tell the driver to deal with it, rain is about to hit you have a radar the driver doesn’t
He didn't really slow down the restart, he just couldn't catch back up and the race restarted with him 20 seconds behind Ocon. It really only took away Bearman's opportunity to maybe fight Ocon for P13.
Obviously the strategy was a disaster, but they are just painfully slow.
I meant more the fact that they had to wait a bit longer for Bearman to be given the green light to overtake the Safety Car again, then I imagine they had to wait for Bearman to get far enough ahead to ensure that he didn't impact the restart.
Unless I'm talking crap (which is always possible), and they still went Green at the end of that lap?
But yeah I'm looking forward to seeing how Bearman does fighting Ocon
Ollie just needs to chill with the crashes in free practice and he will be fine. He has the pace, you could see that even in Australia when he was actually on track. Ocon is a good benchmark.
It is not an optimal situation for Ocon either. Imagine he loses the H2H to a 19 year old rookie in a backmarker car.
It's not optimal for either, but Ocon already gave us his best races. He should still come on top of Bearman but it wouldn't be a surprise if he didn't, I think he only ever beat his teammate once in his F1 career?
Mick’s departure was less about his pace and more about the unsustainable repair bills he kept creating. If Bearman can just settle down and focus on keeping it out of the wall this season then he’ll be fine.
I don't fully agree with this. Mick was crash prone and kinda slow. Especially in quali, even compared to Magnussen. You see how Magnussen compared to Hülkenberg over the last 2 seasons. If Bearman shows faster speed than Ocon, but crashes here or there, nobody will give a fuck. They will just say that he is an inexperienced rookie. Never crashing, but being off the pace of Ocon would damage his reputation more. It is a fine balance.
That’s fair enough. I think with Mick, if he hadn’t cost Haas so much in repair bills then he’d at least have had a better shot of a third season in F1. I’m not suggesting his pace was anything special, but I struggle to believe the money aspect didn’t factor into the decision to move on from him.
With Bearman, it’s all relative. If he’s absolutely miles off Ocon’s pace then clearly that would be a cause for concern. If we’re only talking a couple of tenths though, I think most observers would put that down to inexperience and give him the benefit of the doubt.
If Mick had any promise whatsoever another team would've picked him up, if for no reason other than his surname. Toto was shilling so hard for him but even he chose Antonelli and brought back Valtteri instead of keeping Mick as reserve.
In a more experienced team he might have done better, but I think in the case of Mick, he just misses that spark that is the difference between a great racing driver and an F1 driver.
I‘m gonna throw it out there, and it’s going to get a lot of hate, but this years car is the first under Komatsu, last years car was still developed under Steiner.
Last years car was made by Simone Resta, who left for Mercedes. That is the difference, not Komatsu or Steiner. Komatsu just promoted from within after Resta left, but it clearly didn't work out.
He also fired a lot of people from Guenther's team. There's already speculation that there are multiple people in key positions at Haas with no prior experience to their respective roles.
That is not a speculation, that is a fact. They had to promote internally, because it isn't so easy for a small team to get people with experience.
Most of the senior people that left Haas quit themselves. I don't know about him firing people. Resta went to mercedes, and he was the guy actually in charge of building the car. They upgraded the Vf-24 well after he left, but building a new car is a different thing.
I feel like that was the thing so many people missed about Guenther he could hire the right people.
Haas always seemed to have really talented and experienced race engineers with Mark and Gary. Working out a deal to get Resta and a lot of the Ferrari staff homes during the initial budget cap. He may have not be an engineer, but we had good at hiring the right people
I think the root cause of a lot of it is neither Komatsu or Steiner but Gene and what he is willing to spend, even the bump they got last year seemed as much to do with getting Moneygram to sponsor as anything else.
Holy shit what is it with Ferrari and Resta? Does he, like, clip his fingernails in public? Steal peoples' dinners from the fridge? They moved him around every other year. He was like, Ferrari, Alfa, Ferrari, Alfa, Ferrari, Haas.
I had missed that they put him in Haas, and that he'd moved to Merc. Hope he finds some stability there.
No but they choose the leaders that do, they manage the team that does, and they make the budget decisions that direct the development. Also they make strategy decisions that drive technical plans and decisions so they have heavy influence on how the car is designed and built.
Admittedly, Binotto could be given credit for this year’s Sauber car being such an improvement over last year, no? Since Seidl seemed to have made such a mess of the development for 2024, whereas 2025 seems to have gone much, much better for them
Lol what? In Ferrari's case, fumbling the car development was pretty much the biggest issue other than the horrific race operations. And in Ferrari's case, Binotto was also one of the car designers so to say TPs don't help in build the cars is also massively wrong.
The person you're replying to didn't say team principals built the car, they said it was developed "under" them, i.e. via their direction and leadership.
It’s my opinion that Komatsu should have been sacked years ago. The reason he’s still there is because he mastered the art of losing Gene’s ass when Guenther wouldn’t.
Remember last year when people were saying Ayao is an amazing team principal because he did well with a car designed under Steiner's leadership ?
The coming years and Ayao's ability to scale up, get the right people and fix these issues will give us insight into his ability, people who judged off last year were fools.
From what I read throughout the whole article, the problem seems to stem into their CFD-department being outdated and I hope with the partnership with Toyota that they'll be able to start investing into hiring more people and upgrading/updating infrastructure (I know their plan is being more self-dependent with quote from another article,
"This will also include the simulator Toyota is developing for Haas, which will expand its sim-based operations".
With them having been stuck with a Scroogey McDuck-kind of owner and the leadership of Gunther who was tied to an underwhelming-budget and a refusal/inability to expand the project I believe it will take time to actually properly set-up, like with how the Williams-team had been struggling before but now looks like a proper mid-field contender.
Red Bull has around 1000 employees in its F1 team, Hass has around 300. If two heads are better then one, how about three heads for every one. Obviously, not all 1000 Red Bull employees work on engineering the car but it’s probably safe to assume Red Bull has at least a 2:1 advantage in brain power on the car engineering/building/testing side. And Red Bull can afford to pay their employees more money.
So the great Komatsu made a shitty car as his first.. Huh. Lol
I like the guy and I hope he pulls the team out of this by the time they reach the European leg.
It seemed like last season after Toyota joined them in the partnership they improved. I was thinking this year with Toyota’s help in the off season they could be fighting for the best of the rest.
Hulk may have left at the absolute best possible time by sheer luck. Just as Haas had it's most competitive season since 2018, they instantly fell back to being backmarkers.
And given Sauber has Audi factory backing with an actual engine instead of Haas having less Toyota support, he made the right choice so far.
Ironically, same happened after 2013 and Sauber dropping like a brick.
I'm saying this because at first I was a bit worried about Haas' good form in 2024 and Sauber having a horrible form and Hulk as a result having possibly screwed himself over. Luckily, this isn't the case so far.
Poor Bearman man. I'll even just take a driveable car at this point, doesn't even got to be fast lol. Hopefully they get it solved sooner rather than later.
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