Haas boss Ayao Komatsu fears that the team’s surprising lack of pace at the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix is not a “one-off”.
It was a wretched race weekend for the American outfit, which started with rookie Oliver Bearman crashing his VF-25 during the first practice session of 2025.
Haas finished 19th and 20th during FP1 and FP2 before going on to qualify in the same positions for the Grand Prix.
Starting from the pit lane, Bearman avoided the chaos in tricky wet-weather conditions and managed to keep his car on track to finish in 14th place on Sunday – the last of the classified competitors.
His team-mate, Esteban Ocon, finished just ahead of him after starting the race from 19th place.
After focusing on long-run pace and tyre management exploration during Bahrain pre-season testing, it was left unclear as to how Haas would compare performance-wise to the rest of the grid.
But after Friday, Komatsu revealed to Motorsport.com how he was left stunned by the Banbury-based squad’s lack of performance.
“I don’t think it’s a one-off,” he said.
“It was a big surprise, we weren’t expecting that whatsoever based on Bahrain testing.
“Bahrain testing wasn’t perfect, but we weren’t expecting it anywhere near as bad as Melbourne.
“In FP1, on a very fast lap when the car went out, I thought either something was broken or something is completely out of the ballpark.
“Then when we established, right, nothing’s broken, we’ve got a big issue.”
Haas expects high-speed corner issues to continue in 2025
The 49-year-old went on to explain how the team discovered the issue at hand and how it went about addressing its lack of performance.
”It was pretty clear the problem was in high speed, Turn 9, Turn 10,” Komatsu added.
”Then we just worked and worked to make those corners better with the expense of low speed.
”But even then, low-speed corners are okay, not great – but compared to the issue we had in Turns 9 and 10, it’s night and day.
”So then by Q1, we managed to get Turn 9 more or less respectable but Turn 10, still nowhere.
”We understand why, but with the issues we have, we cannot solve it for all corners, right?
”So I think at least we took [the] correct steps during the weekend.”
Komatsu confirmed that Haas would continue to find solutions this year instead of focusing on 2026 with the new regulations set to come into force.
He believes that the car’s problems were down to its interface with the ground at low ride heights.
However, the motorsport executive noted that Haas would have to endure challenges at several races due to the severity of the problems.
He added: ”I think that’s the best we could do with the Melbourne circuit characteristics, that our car’s weakness that we discovered in Melbourne and then characteristics of Turn 10 as a corner.
”The next point is to understand which part of the car we need to modify, or which part of the car has the sensitivity to solve this performance issue.
”So up to this point, we are reasonably clear.
”Then of course, next is, how are we going to find a solution?
Some of them can be reasonably short-term solutions, but some of them will be an iterative process, both in CFD and wind tunnel.
“So you’re not going to see a solution for some races – it’s pretty severe.”
READ MORE: How F1 Australian GP practice exposed Haas weaknesses
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