Buoyed by pre-season testing, Haas Formula 1 team principal Ayao Komatsu believes it has managed to correct the ‘nasty’ characteristics that plagued the team throughout the 2023 campaign.
Despite often impressive qualifying performances last season, the VF-23’s issues with tyre degradation in race conditions sentenced Haas to tenth place in the Constructor’s Championship.
Haas had hoped that its 2023 limitations could be rectified with its only major upgrade of the season at October’s United States Grand Prix, but instead, the new package failed to deliver the desired results requiring a rethink for the upcoming campaign.
Following the departure of Guenther Steiner over the winter break, Haas will be hoping that newly appointed team principal Ayao Komatsu, formerly director of engineering, will be able to correct the course of the outfit on track.
Pre-season testing saw Haas focus solely on race-distance running in an attempt to understand fully the root of the season-hampering degradation woes. As it stands, Komatsu is already expecting Nico Hulkenberg and Kevin Magnussen to enjoy greater consistency with the VF-24 although some performance concerns remain.
“Last year’s car was inconsistent, it was quite nasty,” Komatsu explained of the VF-23. “Depending on the conditions – tyre condition, wind condition or track temperature – the car really wasn’t behaving in a predictable manner.
“Whereas this year’s car is behaving in a predictable manner. It’s consistent. Yes, we are still lacking downforce, especially in high-speed and sort of balancing medium/low-speed characteristics, but I don’t think it’s got nasty characteristics.”
Komatsu also believes that the team’s challenger for the upcoming campaign is an “acceptable” baseline before upgrades begin to arrive in the early phases of the season. The Haas boss also reasserted that the team will prioritise race performance over making headlines in qualifying.
“You have got to decide what the biggest problem is you want to solve,” Komatsu said. “There is no point qualifying in P7 and going backwards on Sunday. I’d rather qualify P14 but have a car we can race and get up to the top 10. That’s our objective.
“I’m not going to suddenly turn up next weekend here and then start optimizing a car for qualifying, no.
“Everybody knows our problem and how frustrating that is, right? Look at Abu Dhabi, last race of the season, essentially with the launch car. We can qualify P8, which is fantastic, but all of us knew, Saturday night, we can’t do anything on Sunday.
“We lived through that last year. In that sense, it’s not difficult to convince everyone. But at the same time, of course, everyone wants to find out how quick is our car on one-lap pace. But the message had to be clear.
“If there’s one thing we needed to come out from this test, it was learning about tyre management, and our long-run pace. So once you got the objective, that’s what we’re doing. Everything else is noise.”
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