The arrival of an 11th Formula 1 team in the form of Cadillac could make expansion plans at Haas more difficult within a saturated UK F1 job market.
Only two of the 10 teams on the F1 grid operate wholly outside the UK: Ferrari and Sauber.
The remaining eight teams are either solely based or have a portion of their operations in the UK, including Haas.
Haas is the smallest team on the grid and has to fight the big teams like Mercedes and Red Bull in a competitive UK job market, but the arrival of Cadillac in 2026 will make this task more difficult.
Cadillac has a site set up in Silverstone and has already begun work on its F1 project with a growing workforce, one unbound by financial regulations until it joins the F1 grid.
Komatsu was asked during the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix whether Cadillac would hurt Haas’ expansion plans.
“I don’t know if it’s only Cadillac,” Komatsu said (via PlanetF1), “but it’s hard to recruit in the UK because you’ve got so much competition.
“We are finding some good people, some positions, actually finding good people. Some positions is really hard.”
Haas operating ‘below critical mass’
Haas competes in F1 with a workforce of a few hundred people, whereas the likes of McLaren and even Williams have 1000 staff on hand.
A technical alliance with Toyota will help bolster Haas’ testing and simulator programmes, but that will take time.
And due to Haas’ limited workforce, Komatsu is feeling the strain and the need to expand.
“We are trying to grow, but recruitment is hard, and finding good people is not easy,” he said.
“But there’s no doubt we need to grow. You know, we’re below critical mass, shall I say. We’re just about to be saturated all the time, and anything happens, we’re completely overflowing.
“That’s not sustainable. I want to make this thing sustainable. We’re want to be able to operate, let’s say normal operation, with some margin.
“At the moment, I feel very, very little margin.
“Every time something happens, you have to send somebody out from UK.
“But then that means that this UK operation is already on edge, so taking this guy out means they’re gonna be even more on edge.
“That drains people. That really rocks people hard. For me, it’s not fair to ask such an extra effort, so we’ve got to increase the size.”
Haas competing with top F1 teams in recruitment
Luckily for Haas, 2024 was a strong campaign which saw it finish seventh in the Constructors’ standings.
Development at the team is positive, the aforementioned Toyota alliance is attractive and the team boasts a strong 2025 driver line-up in Esteban Ocon and Ollie Bearman.
As a result, Haas is starting to compete with the big boys when it comes to F1 recruitment.
“Hopefully people see now what we’re doing this year and think, OK, Haas is really serious,” said Komatsu.
“We are here for a long time. We are improving, and hopefully our people think it’s a good chance to be part of.
“We actually get people coming from much bigger teams like Mercedes and Red Bull.”
Komatsu explained the trick in recruiting staff to a smaller team like Haas and tempting them away from bigger teams is all about “personality.”
He explained: “We are a much smaller team, so it’s hard work. You’ve got to do a lot more. But certain things are better, right? It just depends on the personality.
“If you are somebody who just wants to be given, ‘This is your job, this is what you have to do as best as possible, then we are a race-winning team.’ If that’s what he or she likes, they will go for that big team.
“But if he or she wants to have a bigger overview or wants to me more multi-tasking — it depends on the personality.
“So again, we got to make sure we have the right personality that fits the organisation.”
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