Haas team boss Ayao Komatsu has revealed that the US outfit’s focus this week in Bahrain will not be on outright performance but on tackling its Achilles’ heel from last season: tyre degradation
Last year, Haas achieved some promising performances in qualifying, but the team’s VF-23 consistently dropped down the order during races due to its inability to effectively manage tyre wear.
This inconsistency significantly hampered the team's progress and left Haas at the bottom of the constructors' championship.
Haas has incorporated changes into its new VF-24 with the express goal of improving tyre management. Pre-season testing in Bahrain therefore becomes a crucial proving ground for these modifications.
Instead of experimenting with various performance setups, the team will dedicate its three days of testing to gathering data and evaluating the effectiveness of their solutions.
“It's not really so much comparing the differences across the specs, but if you look at our issue last year, it was clear that on Sunday we just couldn’t manage the tyres for 300 kilometres,” commented Komatsu, quoted by Motorsport.com. “So that’s what we’re focused on.
“Our Bahrain test programme is completely focused on generating the relevant data so that our engineers can understand what’s happening to the car and what’s happening to the tyres.
“Then we can decide, if we have good quality data, on the conclusion of how to improve it. Then we decide a different direction on that.”
©Haas
Komatsu believes that Haas has the solid foundation it needs to carry itself up the field, although progress is a long-term objective.
“The short-term objective really is to make incremental improvements,” he added. “As I’ve said before, I believe we’ve got good ingredients and we’ve got good people in the team, but we’ve really got to focus on the team being as one to make those improvements.
“Long-term obviously comes as a result of that, so for instance, our first ‘medium-term’ goal is to upgrade to a car that works, and that has happened before so I believe we can do it.”
Wholesale aero changes implemented on Haas’ VF-23 at the US Grand Prix in Austin last year, while their impact was minimal, served to put the team on the right development path for 2024.
©Haas
With a specific course of action now set, Kevin Magnussen hopes Haas can proceed with a development direction that instills consistency and ultimately pushes the team forward.
“The update was more of an experiment last year,” explained the Dane. “It’s hard to call it an update or upgrade because it wasn’t really upwards, it was just sideways, but it was a very good experiment in terms of committing to the concept of car that we have this year.
“I think we wanted to see the potential and characteristics on track with this concept of car, and this year is in that direction.
"I hope we can take a step forward. We committed to this year’s car quite late in development, so we’ve had quite a short time to develop, and it’s actually been going quite well.
“Although I don’t think we can guarantee that it’s a step forward straightaway in Bahrain at the first race, I think the development looks more interesting at least.”
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