Haas hoping for multi-million dollar windfall after 'pressing green button'

Haas is hoping it can land a multi-million dollar windfall after deciding to 'press the green button' on rolling out a late-season boost for this weekend's United States Grand Prix.

Aside from unveiling a tweaked livery for its home race at the Circuit of the Americas, the VF-25s of Oliver Bearman and Esteban Ocon will also be sporting an upgrade the team hopes will aid its push in the F1 constructors' championship.

Just 26 points split sixth-placed Racing Bulls from Haas in ninth, with the difference in prize money between the positions around $30 million, representing a significant amount for the smaller teams.

At this stage, the update package could be a game-changer for Haas. Assessing what the upgrades could do for Bearman and Ocon, speaking exclusively to RacingNews365, team principal Ayao Komatsu said: "I never want to count my chickens, shall I say, until it's proven.

"But if you look at how tight the grid is, we lost a P8 [in Singapore Grand Prix qualifying] by four-hundredths, so even if the upgrade gives us 0.05 seconds, that could make a difference.

"Quite often, if you look at who's out in Q1, who has just made it, it's less than tenths, so everything matters.

"Hopefully it will help us, but I don't know. We need to test it, evaluate it, and see if we've gone in the right direction or not.

"One thing we shouldn't become is complacent. So far, everything we've seen has been working, but we've got to assess it intelligently in Austin without complacency."

Every single thing matters

Komatsu conceded, however, he and his team had to bide their time before deciding whether the package should be introduced due to budgetary concerns this season.

"Like everybody else, we had to switch to our '26 car reasonably early, so we had Austin as a possibility," said Komatsu.

"Again, we have had to be careful about the budget cap, of course, and this is a new experience, in the sense that until this year, we were far away from the budget cap. This is the first year we will be on the budget cap.

"That means, of course, how much margin do you leave for accident damage, something unexpected, so that's been tricky.

"We were only going to do it [the upgrade package] if we had to, but then the point we pressed the green button, it was pretty obvious.

"The field is so tight and every single thing matters, and that could be the difference between P7, P8, and P9 in the constructors', so, for me, we had to do it."