Haas boss 'felt sick' after sobering warning set off F1 alarms

Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu has explained how he "felt really sick" following an Australian Grand Prix weekend which sounded major alarm bells. 

Throughout pre-season testing in Bahrain, Haas stuck to high-fuel long runs on the harder tyres to gather more race-based data as it welcomed Esteban Ocon from Alpine and handed Oliver Bearman his full-time F1 debut. 

Tyre concerns had plagued the team throughout the 2023 season, although good progress had been made in '24, with the team finishing a strong seventh with 58 points compared to last and just 12 in '23.

In Melbourne, the team discovered a major flaw with its car in the high-speed flick of Turns 9 and 10. 

The problem was that the car was bottoming out, thus shedding all of its downforce and causing Bearman and Ocon to bleed off speed, with the rookie Briton crashing heavily during Friday practice. 

In qualifying, Bearman suffered a mechanical failure on his out-lap, whilst Ocon was nearly six-tenths slower than Nico Hulkenberg's Stake, with Liam Lawson out-of-place Red Bull between the two.

Reflecting on the alarming wake-up call, Komatsu explained how he launched the team into emergency mode to rectify the situation.

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"Literally, I felt sick, because we were six-tenths off the next slowest car, six-tenths. How are you going to recover that?" Komatsu explained to select media, including RacingNews365. 

"But there was no option that we had to recover quickly, for me, by race three, but how are you going to do that? Nobody's ever done that before. 

"So, not knowing the degree of the issue, which was pretty deep and then not having an option to recover quickly, those two things made me feel really sick, but the only thing you can do is work with people, and trust those people who made amazing improvements to the 2024 car.

"The development rate was amazing, and I had to say: 'Look, we haven't suddenly forgotten how to make a performing car. Yes, we missed something in the process, but we are the same people who made the VF-24 the fifth-quickest car by the end of the year.'

"We just had to get on with it and do our best, and needed to take some risks. We could not wait until the planned upgrade in Imola, as then the season would be over, and we cannot have that.

"So for Suzuka, with the high-speed sector, if we don't change anything, we're going to be last by six-tenths again, and we just cannot have that, full-stop. It was not an option to do nothing; even if we fail, we need to do something to learn from it."

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Although Haas did not score any points in Australia, remarkably, it hauled a five-eight finish with Ocon and Bearman next time out in China. 

This marked the team's best two-car result since the four-five of the 2018 Austrian GP, which stands as its best in grand prix racing.

After plummeting down the standings in 2020, Haas endured a point-less season in '21, the only time it has failed to register a single point in one season. 

That fear of a possible point-less season in 2025 Komatsu felt was a "real possibility" after FP1 in Melbourne.

"I wasn't prepared to wait for Imola, we had to fix it for Suzuka, and in the worst-case, if we can't fix it 100%, then at least make a step improvement, and if that doesn't work, at least we learned something," he said. 

"So at no point was I looking ahead thinking: 'Oh shit, we cannot score points for half the season', because it is just not an option, you have to get on with it and fix it as quickly as possible.

"I think lots of people in the team, looking at the result in Melbourne, were thinking: 'Oh my god, this year, there's a real possibility we cannot score any points in 24 races, and looking at FP1 in Melbourne, that was the feeling you got.

"But that is not an option. That is just not acceptable by any stretch of the imagination, so you've got to solve it.

"It is not the situation you want to put yourself in, but you are in that situation, and honestly, the full focus was just to get out of it as quickly as possible by working with your people - so I didn't even think about a worst-case scenario."

After round 14 of the season, Haas is ninth in the standings, on 35 points, but is just 17 points behind sixth-placed Aston Martin.