F1 folk: The 'lucky' engineer who guided Grosjean and helped build Haas

Ayao Komatsu moved to England from Japan as a teenager to pursue his Formula 1 dreams, and achieved his goal thanks to a chance meeting with Takuma Sato. From BAR, he progressed from a tyre engineer in Team Enstone's testing operation to its chief race engineer in 10 years. Then he was off to Haas following Romain Grosjean, whose F1 career he witnessed from the first race in 2009 to its abrupt end in Bahrain. This is his story, the first in a new series focusing on F1's paddock personalities

Updated Oct 3, 2023, 12:45 PM

That smell... When they brought the car back to the garage, that whole look and that smell - the smell of a burnt chassis, fire extinguisher - I will never forget. It's still terrifying.

I was sitting on the pit wall - and at first, when the flame went up, I didn't realise it was Romain. I didn't see him go off because I was looking at other things. But once you realise it's him... The car is in the fireball, you don't see him come out. It felt like an eternity. And it wasn't my driver in the car, it was my friend.

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Author Oleg Karpov

After attempting to study engineering, Oleg was thrown out of his Moscow university for spending more time at the racetrack as a junior press officer for the national Lada racing series than attending lectures. His first job as a journalist was at the Soviet Sport newspaper, and in 2011 he moved to Berlin to pursue a freelance career in Formula 1. He joined Motorsport.com in 2015 and became a contributor to GP Racing magazine in 2021. When it's not race week, he plays squash every Wednesday and Sunday and likes to procrastinate by playing chess, with his Elo peaking at 2069 on one of the biggest online chess platforms.