Haas make 'ridiculous' admission over fundamental F1 car problem

Haas boss Ayao Komatsu has labelled the team's deficit in Australia as "ridiculous" as it battles to solve a fundamental car problem he felt left the machine "broken."

Across the season-opening weekend in Australia, a major aerodynamic problem at high-speed was uncovered by the team, which had been missed from pre-season testing.

During running in Bahrain, the VF-25 was brimmed full of fuel with the team completing long runs throughout the three days, something Komatsu conceded was a mistake as they did not try low-fuel runs. 

The lack of stability at high-speed is most evident on low tanks, with Komatsu explaining how he initially feared the cars of Ollie Bearman and Esteban Ocon were "broken" before realising the truth of the problems.

However, Bearman provided a bright spark in sprint race qualifying, narrowly missing out on a spot in SQ3 having set a time good enough to advance through before others bettered it. He will start 12th, with Ocon 18th.

"I don't think it's a one-off, it was a big surprise," Komatsu told media including RacingNews365 in a frank session in Shanghai ahead of the Chinese Grand Prix.

"We weren't expecting that whatsoever based on Bahrain testing. Yes, in Bahrain testing the car wasn't perfect, but we weren't expecting to be anywhere near as bad as Melbourne.

“Honestly, in FP1, the very first lap when the car went out, I thought either something was broken, or something was completely out of the ballpark.

"Then when we established nothing's broken, it was: 'Right, we've got a big issue.'

"From that point, we're not going to have any new parts from FP2 to FP3, it is a matter of: 'How can we make this better?' It was pretty clear that the problem was in the high-speed Turns 9 and 10, and then we just worked, worked, worked to make those corners better, at the expense of the low-speed.

"Even they weren't great, but compared to the issue we had in Turns 9 and 10, it was night and day, we were the slowest by a country margin, like six-tenths, it was a ridiculous amount."

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Haas reject abandoning 2025

With the troubled birth of the car, Haas could be well suited to abandoning development on the 2025 machine to fully focus on the '26 car, with the possibility of a huge step forward in the new active aerodynamic regulations. 

However, Komatsu flatly rejected the team taking such a course of action. 

"That is not sustainable to anyone, and if we don't face this problem head on, we're not going around it," he said.

"Because if you just leave it and move onto 2026, there is so much doubt in people's confidence and capabilities and we don't learn anything in terms of this failure. 

"We might understand how we missed it, but we're not putting anything in place to make sure things like this don't happen. That may not be applicable to 2026, but that process is the team working together, finding solutions and people and the team's growth.

"It is very important we solve this issue."