Failed 2023 US GP upgrade was “lowest of the low” moment for Haas

Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu is proud of the improvement his team made in the season after they endured their “lowest of the low” moment.

Komatsu replaced Guenther Steiner as team principal at Haas one year ago today. In the previous season, the team slumped to last in the championship.

The final races of 2023 were an especially tough time for the team as an intended upgrade they introduced at their home race in Austin failed to provide the forecast gains in performance. Komatsu admitted the team made a mistake by leaving it so late in the year to introduce such a major upgrade.

“Austin last year was the lowest point, one of the lowest points of this team,” he told Epartrade. “To do a race 19 [18] update, that didn’t make sense.

“Then we did it, and of course the car didn’t go quicker, the car actually went slower.”

In 2024, Haas’s first season under Komatsu, the team rose to seventh in the constructors’ championship, Alpine narrowly beating them to sixth. He said the result was “much, much better than anybody anticipated.”

“Coming from that low, lowest of the low, to having such a positive vibe in the team, working well as a team, I think we came a long way,” said Komatsu. “I think everybody’s looking ahead, which is great.”

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He admitted the team had been “pretty down” after Alpine took sixth place off them late last year, “but in a way it’s good to be down being dropped from P6 to P7 because we are there fighting.”

Komatsu said that when he took over from Steiner he believed there were changes he could make to improve the team’s performance right away.

“Guenther’s done a lot for the team,” he said. “He was instrumental in setting up the team. Without Guenther, this team [wouldn’t] exist. I have huge respect for that.

“I’ve been with the team since 2016, day one of the racing year. Of course Guenther was there from before, to set up the team. But I joined in January 2016 so I know the team pretty well, I know the people, I know the strengths and the weaknesses of the organisation.

“The last five years we haven’t been performing. There’s certain frustrations, things that I thought we can do better if we implemented certain things here and there. So that was really, for me, an opportunity to see or implement those things, to see if my assumption was right or if I was wrong.

“Then honestly, like I said, I believed in the people we got and then those guys proved me right. I tried my best to give them the environment for them to perform, put upgrades on the car that works and then hats off to them, they delivered.”

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However Komatsu believes the team was already close to the limit of what it could achieve and it needed its new technology deal with Toyota to raise its level further.

“Certain things I had to do immediately. I was pretty sure [that] without any further investment in terms of resource or facility, we can perform better as a team. So that’s a bit I had to get going straight away.

“But in the background, you had to raise the ceiling of the team. I was thinking, how is the best way to do this? And then in pretty early days, from Bahrain time, I started talking with Toyota.

“The initial, of course, idea was a bit blurred, if you like. But then the more we talked together, it was pretty clear that this is a perfect match, that if we do this collaboration, we can increase the absolute capability of the team. If we can work as a small team, efficiently, then if we can gradually increase that baseline capability, we can achieve better things.

“So, for instance, if I don’t change anything, if we just keep going with this size, this business model, without things like the Toyota collaboration, I think what we are doing now would be the ceiling. We won’t go any better. But that’s not good enough.

“We want to be improving. We want to be consistently top of the midfield and then looking ahead, improve even further. So in order to do that, then this Toyota technical collaboration was the key in my opinion.”

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