Komatsu says Haas has 'unprecedented' recruitment plans

Haas F1 team principal Ayao Komatsu says his squad is planning an unprecedented recruitment blitz over the next few months after its marked upturn in recent performance.

Haas won last year's wooden spoon by coming bottom of the constructors championship, with Nico Hulkenberg and Kevin Magnussen having finished in the points on just five out of the 22 races in 2023.

This year the team has already surpassed that figure before the summer break with ten races still so go and is P7 in the standings with a notable success in Austria where both drivers finished in the top ten.

That's despite pre-season turmoil for the team when long-standing principal Gunther Steiner's contract wasn't renewed and Komatsu found himself promoted from heading the backroom engineering team right into the spotlight..

The change has proved a notable success, and team owner Gene Haas is now reported to be ready to loosen the purse strings and provide the funds to allow Komatsu to bolster his team to build on the current momentum.

• Read also: Haas stresses importance of trust and clarity for Ocon success

"What we need to convince [the] owner is performance. He’s always looking at, ‘We want to get better, how can we go quicker?’", Komatsu told Autosport magazine before the summer break.

Previously. Steiner insisted that he needed more resources to improve performance. But Komatsu has been able to achieve a notable turnaround without having any additional resources to achieve it.

"When you’re working together, the atmosphere is so different," he said. “And when the atmosphere is so different, when there’s so much positivity, of course people function better. People produce performance.

"That’s the biggest difference, I think," he insisted. "We can show baby steps that if we work together, even with the same resources," adding it meant he was now able to go looking for the people he needs to maintain the current upswing.

"Even though we are on a huge recruitment that we’ve never seen before in the history of Haas F1 Team, we haven’t actually got those people on board yet, so we are largely still the same size."

Komatsu also made a point of casting around for existing people within the Haas organisation that weren't being utilised as well as might be, starting with Haas Automation CEO Bob Murray.

“My strategy was to get people like Bob onboard - who has been Gene’s right-hand man for 38 years - and Gene onboard, get them involved, get them to realise what it takes to be successful in Formula 1.

“The previous strategy might have been the opposite," he added, in a rare rebuke of his predecessor in the role, hinting at some of the tensions that might have led to Steiner's sudden and unexpected departure in February.

"My strategy from day one is, if the owner doesn’t understand the reality, then of course he’s going to get annoyed because he would expect the result that we cannot achieve," Komatsu explained.

"To get his expectations right, I really needed him to understand more about what it takes to be successful in Formula 1," Komatsu continued. "Bob is a very key part of that.

"What I’m really pleased about is that Bob made that commitment as well when he signed me. He said: ‘Ayao, I’m going to support you, I’m going to work with you’.

“It just goes to show that there’s commitment from Gene and Bob, from our parent company, and then Bob is 100 per cent backing it up by his actions. I’m really grateful about that.”

Among the items on Komatsu's list has been sorting next year's driver line-up, with Hulkenberg departing for Audi and Magnussen having already been told that his contract will not be renewed beyond the end of 2024.

Esteban Ocon has now been confirmed as joining the team from Alpine, and he will be alongside rookie driver Ollie Bearman who made a sensational maiden F1 bow in Saudi Arabia as a last-minute replacement for Carlos Sainz at Ferrari.

"I think lots of it comes down to transparency, trust and then clarity of rules of engagement," Komatsu said when asked how he planned to manage his new set of drivers in 2025, given Ocon's tempestuous history with past team mates.

"No personal agenda, a clear team agenda about how we need to go through this race weekend or this year, what’s the objective, what’s the rules of engagement. As long as that’s clarified in advance, then the trust is there."

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