How Komatsu was moulded by F1 on his rocky climb to the top job at Haas

“Don’t be so Italian!” With a broad grin and a twinkle in the eye, Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu dismisses GP Racing’s suggestion that, since the hour is just past 10am, the cappuccino he’s now sipping would constitute a ghastly breach of national coffee etiquette in the home of the cappuccino, where the froth-topped beverage is considered a breakfast drink only. And he should know, given his team’s close ties with both Ferrari and Dallara.

The general tenor of the salutations pitcher in Komatsu’s direction upon arrival was ‘long time no see’. He was a twice-a-week man here at Big Rock Bond until his elevation to the job
of team principal at Haas, such are the demands of his new role – even though he’s based in
the team’s facility in nearby Banbury, whereas his predecessor was US-based. Thus the expedient of taking climbing shoes on the road; there are bouldering facilities within striking distance of most circuits. 

Bold moves

Komatsu has often used the adjective ‘lucky’ to describe his career. Inspired by watching Formula 1 on TV at the height of the Prost-Senna rivalry, he left his native Japan at the age of 18 to pursue a career in engineering. Even with the assistance of a government grant, that’s an intrepid decision at such a young age – especially when you don’t speak the language.

“When you look back, you could say it’s quite a big move,” he says. “And it was. But when you’re 18, and you think, ‘OK, this is what I want to do, what do I have to do to get there?’ for me it was just one of those steps of thinking. I needed to move to England. And that was it. I didn’t think about the gravity of it.

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“Maybe that’s the beauty of being so young – you don’t fear things that maybe you should, but if you worry about things too much you don’t do it, right? And my parents said, ‘If this is what you want to do, then we’ll support you.’ When I say I was lucky, it’s that at certain points in my life I just bumped into people who helped me take the next step. And those are things you cannot plan or make happen by yourself.”

At Loughborough University he wrote to “50 or 60” companies, including all the F1 teams, for a work placement, receiving rejections or radio silence from all but two, Lotus Engineering and MIRA. Picking Lotus was the first of several inflection points that led him to F1: his boss at Lotus was a keen amateur racer who facilitated hands-on work experience, which led to more ‘spannering’ work in the British Saloon Car Championship when he went back to university. At this level, when there’s only one or two people working on a car, you learn how to interpret driver comments in the absence of rich data.

Watch: Climbing Up The Grid with Ayao Komatsu, Haas F1 Team Principal

It was at Silverstone, while under a car swapping out an anti-roll bar, that he first encountered fellow Japanese Takuma Sato, who was essaying his first races in British F3’s National class ahead of a campaign with Carlin the following season. They became friends and Komatsu was able to dovetail his PhD studies with unpaid work shadowing Carlin’s engineers for a season and a half.

“As long as you’re proactive, getting involved, sometimes things happen,” he says. “Sometimes it doesn’t, but that’s all you can do.

“You’ve got 20 people looking after two cars [in F3], you can do anything you want compared with one or two people doing it part-time. I learned you can have all that equipment but at the end of the day it’s a human being behind it, making decisions. I saw it wasn’t just science and numbers. That was quite an eye-opener as well.”

"When I say I was lucky, it’s that at certain points in my life I just bumped into people who helped me take the next step" Ayao Komatsu

Sato then came to the rescue while Komatsu was looking for paid work post-PhD. Ayao was mulling over an offer from Kodewa, the German F3 team run by Colin Kolles (later to become Bernie Ecclestone’s eyes and ears on the factory floor at Jordan, Hispania and Caterham in F1) when a more appealing proposition arrived.

In 2003, Sato was BAR-Honda’s test driver, later supplanting the underperforming Jacques Villeneuve in a race seat full-time, and he connected Komatsu with Honda Racing Development bigwigs Shoichi Tanaka and Otmar Szafnauer, who offered a position in BAR’s vehicle dynamics group.

This was at the peak of the Bridgestone-Michelin tyre war, an era of unrestricted testing and three hours of sleep at night for those charged with performing it.

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“Working for a small team, you do everything from washing the wheel rims to looking at data and talking to the drivers,” he says. “That experience was very helpful because if I’d gone straight from uni to a big team – and I can’t remember how many people were at BAR then, but let’s say 300 people – if you go straight into that environment you don’t get to understand the whole operation.

Sato helped Komatsu get his F1 break when joining BAR

Photo by: Motorsport Images

“If you have that experience with a smaller organisation you can go into a team where you’re in-season testing all the time with a huge budget, and you don’t lose sight of what’s important. You don’t get lost.”

Crash course

Komatsu moved to Renault in 2006 and was ultimately promoted into a race engineer role, working with Vitaly Petrov at first. But it’s his relationship with Romain Grosjean which defined the next part of his career.

Grosjean, fast but mentally fragile at first, overcame a rocky start to in F1 and would even, in the mid-2010s, be in the frame for a Ferrari drive. Komatsu was with him all the way from 2012 through the move to the then-new Haas team in 2016 to his exit in 2020.

In late 2012, Grosjean achieved pariah status, described by Mark Webber as a “first-lap nutcase” and even receiving a one-race ban for his role in a lap-one shunt at Spa. In the aftermath of that he sought help from a sports psychologist which he credits with turning around his life and career. Komatsu has subsequently revealed that he felt he could have done more to support Grosjean at the time but lacked the necessary life experience.

“I was always interested in the human side of the sport,” he says. “In club racing and British F3 there was a lot of talking to the driver, reading between the lines. Then going through intensive testing with people like Taku, Jenson Button, Fernando Alonso, Heikki Kovalainen, I was learning all the time.

“When you go from performance engineer to race engineer, your job is to manage the driver. Yes, I’ve done the best I could back then but, looking back – I remember talking about this with Romain – if I’d had five more years’ experience, been five years older, maybe I’d have done certain things differently. I feel… not regret, but a bit bad in the sense that I couldn’t offer that extra support structure to Romain back then.

“His reply was amazing – he said, ‘We grew up together, I wouldn’t change anything.’ It was kind of him to say that.”

Those memories of Grosjean are defined by late 2012 or his later issues highlighted by Guenther Steiner swearathons in Drive to Survive probably overlook the fact that by the second half of ’13 he was the only driver on the grid offering a consistent challenge to the dominant Sebastian Vettel. This too had a notable effect on Komatsu’s professional outlook.

Grosjean and Komatsu would follow each other from Renault through Lotus and eventually to Haas

Photo by: Sutton Images

“I remember the Japanese GP [where Grosjean qualified fourth], going into Turn 1 Romain overtook three cars including Sebastian,” he says. “But we knew that although we were leading, we had Sebastian and Mark [Webber] behind, so we were one versus two. One of the Red Bulls was going to pit early to get us out of the way, probably Mark, and then Sebastian was just going to go. So we knew we were going to be P2 at best.

“So after the pitstops, one overcut us and the other undercut us. We didn’t manage the blue flags very well. And in the end Mark overtook us for P2. I remember us being very upset about it. Even though we were on the podium we were kicking ourselves.

“But then a race later we got P2, which was the best position we could have achieved. That was always our goal. If the best position you can achieve is the win, then you have to win. If the best you can do it P10, you need to finish P10.”

"I feel… not regret, but a bit bad in the sense that I couldn’t offer that extra support structure to Romain back then" Ayao Komatsu

Fall and rise

Post-2013, the Renault-Lotus experience deteriorated with an innovative but underfunded and largely uncompetitive car in the new hybrid era. As the venture capitalist owners ceased to pay the bills, staff left and morale plummeted. At Spa in 2015 the bailiffs arrived and briefly locked the team out of the garage.

This would prove to be a usefully formative experience for later years with Haas, where money was a particular problem from 2019 (when sponsorship monies from title sponsor Rich Energy proved as elusive as cans of said beverage on shop shelves) until the latest Concorde Agreement provided teams with more financial stability from 2020 onwards.

“What I’m learning every day, is that any experience I’ve had… none of it is wasted,” says Komatsu. “Any experience, good or bad, I have to use all of it to do my job to the best of my ability.

“And of course, that race at Spa, I remember it very well. From Thursday, when we didn’t know whether we would be able to run the car, to Romain being on the podium on Sunday, that was amazing. At Suzuka as well, our hospitality was locked, we had no power to the garage so we couldn’t send the file to the car to fire up the power unit.

Komatsu has been lauded for his steering of the Haas team across his first season in charge

Photo by: Malcolm Griffiths / GP Racing

"I had to get one of the control engineers to come and put it on a USB stick to transfer it to the PU guy’s laptop to program the car. I couldn’t get my engineers to the circuit – no point, there’s no internet – so I asked them to work from the hotel. Romain came and we did the circuit walk [on Thursday], just the two of us.

“All that experience, how to manage people in that kind of difficult situation, how to stick together and have some positives – ‘OK, this is all outside our control, what can we do to move forward positively?’ – and everyone has their best go at it, all those experiences are now helping me do my everyday job.”

That job is now team principal, a role vacated at the beginning of the year by Steiner in circumstances still subject to legal acrimony between the two parties. It seems fair to ask whether Komatsu saw this job as a natural next career step or whether, like Andrea Stella at McLaren, it was a case of stepping into the unfamiliar role because he was better placed than an outside candidate.

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“I’d never seen myself being a team principal,” he says. “Whatever job I did, vehicle dynamicist, performance engineer, race engineer, I was focused on that. But, when you know your job very well, and you’re doing the best you can, you’re always looking – ‘OK, there’s something else limiting the performance, or stopping us moving forward, what is it?’

"You see there are constraints outside your remit and you’re talking to the other managers to see how you can improve that. So, regardless of your position, you’re thinking of the next steps – not in terms of your career, but in terms of what we need to do as a team to make the car go faster.

“So when the team principal job offer came from Gene, I had a decent idea of what areas we can improve. That was my mentality, let’s say.”

In F1 there has always been teams without a realistic hope of winning, and plenty – drivers too – who just seemed happy to be there making up the numbers so long as the bills could be paid. After a promising start in 2016 Haas became enmired in the lower midfield, stymied by tight budgets and a difficulty in adding performance to its cars through in-season development.

In recent seasons it’s been bumping along the bottom with Williams; the question is, given that the current Concorde Agreement protects teams’ value by enshrining F1 as a closed shop, what incentive is there to get better? What can be a realistic aspiration for a team like Haas against powerful and wealthy manufacturer-backed organisations with many more employees and resources?

Gene Haas promoted Komatsu after the departure of Guenther Steiner ahead of the season

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

“For the longer-term future our ambition is to be in the top four and have the chance to be on the podium in some races,” says Komatsu. “Of course there’s a long way to go. But for sure we’re not just happy to be there. That’s why Gene made a change. Last year we were last [in the constructors’ championship]. For me there’s no point in just participating. It’s a competition. You always need to improve.

“So what we’ve been doing this season is focusing on improving from where we were in January, making continuous improvements and getting the results we should be producing within the constraints. And in parallel, how to remove those constraints and perform better in absolute terms.

"For the longer-term future our ambition is to be in the top four and have the chance to be on the podium in some races" Ayao Komatsu

“So long as we do that we have a very good chance of achieving what we want – to be at the top of the midfield consistently, on merit, and not relying on someone else underperforming. And when something happens at the front, possibly having a shout at the podium.”

Twelve months ago that might have sounded like bluster but now, after a season where Nico Hulkenberg has ushered a Haas through to Q3 and the team occupies sixth in the constructors' heading into the final two races of 2024, the upper midfield is now in sight.

And now, with the signing of a technical partnership with a certain well-known car manufacturer’s racing arm, it looks like the next few grips on this particular wall come stamped with a Toyota logo…

With Komatsu at the wheel, Haas building and Toyota joining the project, what does the future hold?

Photo by: Malcolm Griffiths / GP Racing