Twelve months ago, Ayao Komatsu was pessimistic when discussing Haas’ expectations for the 2024 season. He predicted the team would be the slowest on the grid at the start of the year, and was not in a position to openly admit he had set the team a target of eighth in the constructors’ championship simply to have something to aim for.
Asked this week how different expectations and targets are now, and the Haas team principal laughs as he reflects on the contrast.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t significant areas of the team Komatsu wants to address. In fact, he’s been hard at work restructuring the trackside organization at Haas and bringing in new personnel over the winter, with one in particular sure to make headlines.
While Ronan O’Hare will look after Oliver Bearman, Laura Mueller will be Esteban Ocon’s race engineer, becoming the first full-time female race engineer in modern Formula 1. Not that the ‘female’ part of that sentence is something Komatsu gave any time to.
“If you look at how many female engineers we have in the office, it’s definitely more than before,” Komatsu says. “But it’s not like I chose Laura because she’s female. We don’t care about nationality, gender – it really doesn’t matter. because what matters is work.
“How you can fit into the team? How you can maximize the performance? And Laura and Ronan happened to be the right people. I believe it is the right choice.”
Mueller has risen through the ranks at Haas, her first F1 team, where she started off as a simulator engineer and then became one of the team’s performance engineers. With both of the new race engineers being relatively inexperienced, the addition of a new chief race engineer in the form of Francesco Nenci – who includes Toyota and Sauber among his previous teams – is seen as particularly crucial to adding further strength to the set-up.
“They have both got good potential and good determination,” Komatsu says. “So we decided to promote internally, because that sends a good message for everyone as well – that rather than going for some big names of experience from outside, promote. Somebody may not have enough experience to start off with, but good potential, good work ethic, good communication… just support each other; help.
“In terms of experience, it’s not a huge amount of experience. So that’s where we really need to work as a team. And then it’s great having Francesco. He’s the one having lots of experience coming in as a chief race engineer.”
With new head of strategy Carine Cridelich coming in from RB in March, and Mark Lowe returning to the team in the new sporting director role – a development that included former team manager Pete Crolla leaving – there has been a significant overhaul of personnel that work hands-on at track.
“What’s been the change is the trackside team,” he says. “It’s a huge change, but I felt that’s one of the weakest areas last year. And then the more and more the car became competitive, kind of that exposed it more, if you like.
“Then also the mentality as well, in terms of mindset… When you’re fighting, when you have got the car – towards the end of the season, we had the fifth-fastest car – some races like Abu Dhabi was amazing as well, but in terms of execution… we left too many points on the table, from the trackside operation. So really needed to step up on that one.”
The changes were cemented by what Komatsu believes were missed opportunities throughout 2024, coming as early as the first race in Bahrain. Although he acknowledges it was tough to have an impact without adding a chief race engineer or moving on from former race engineers Mark Slade and Gary Gannon, Komatsu also believes a lack of training opportunities played a part, and points to the team’s new testing of previous car (TPC) program as another key development.