Mar.22 (GMM) Haas’ 2025 car is fundamentally flawed, team boss Ayao Komatsu admits.
At the end of 2023, team owner Gene Haas was so unhappy with the small American outfit’s dire performance that he sacked Gunther Steiner and replaced him with senior engineer Komatsu.
Haas took a big step forward last year – but have crashed back down to earth so far in 2025.
“It was a big surprise,” Komatsu admitted to reporters in Shanghai.
“In Bahrain for testing the car wasn’t perfect, but we didn’t expect anything anywhere near as bad as we saw in Melbourne,” said the Japanese.
“Honestly, in the first practice when the car came out, I thought either something is broken or something is completely wrong. When we determined that nothing was broken, we thought ‘Ok, we have a big problem’.”
The good news is that Komatsu claims team engineers “clearly understand” the deficit. “It’s a combination of aerodynamic oscillation and our rear downforce characteristics,” he said.
“If you only had one, you could live with it. But when you combine them, the car becomes very difficult to drive.”
As for the bad news, “We have to figure out what part of the car we need to change to solve this performance problem,” said the team boss.
“Some of it may be relatively short-term solutions, but some of it will be an iterative process both in CFD and wind tunnel,” he added. “You will not see a solution in the upcoming races. So yes, it is quite serious.”
One early suspicion is a flaw with Ferrari’s simulator, which Haas uses as well. Reports after Melbourne suggested Ferrari’s early problems in 2025 were also caused by faulty sim data.
“We put more performance on the car over the winter,” Komatsu insists. “You drive in the simulator, you do simulations, and it’s all fine.
“But when we got to turn 10 in Melbourne, it all came crashing down. At least we found out early. Imagine if we had been mediocre for five, six, seven races before we found out we have a serious fundamental problem.
“Everyone was shocked. For some, it took a day to accept that we have a serious problem. Now everyone is working diligently to solve it.
“No one is asking questions about whether we have a problem or not. We do,” the Japanese admits.
Komatsu insists Haas cannot simply write off 2025 to focus on the all-new 2026 regulations, either. “If you just leave it and move on, who can guarantee that similar things won’t happen in the future,” he said.
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