Kevin Magnussen's race in Jeddah was marred by a 10-second penalty for contact with Alex Albon, when he received a second one for overtaking Yuki Tsunoda without respecting track limits.
The Dane then followed the order to slow down the Japanese and the other drivers following him, in order to allow teammate Nico Hulkenberg to create a window to make a “free” pit stop.
After the race, Racing Bulls described Haas' strategy as “unsportsmanlike”, while Albon, who was also among the drivers who were slowed down, spoke of a “brazen” maneuver referring to Magnussen's overtaking of Tsunoda.
Komatsu admitted that the team did not realize that Magnussen had left the track to overtake Tsunoda, and underlined that in that case it would have asked him to give the position back to the Japanese.
“I accept the criticism,” he said when asked to comment on the situation by Motorsport.com. “The criticism is that we, as a team, didn't know that Kevin had overtaken Tsunoda coming off the track. We didn't know it at the time.”
“So that's a criticism I totally accept, we should have known that right away as a team. And then Kevin should have returned the position himself. But if he hadn't, as a team we should have asked him to do it right away.”
“And if we had done it, there would have been no arguments. Then we would have overtaken Tsunoda anyway, because we had the pace to do it.”
Ayao Komatsu, Team Principal, Haas F1 Team, talks to the press
Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
However, Komatsu did not regret the way Magnussen slowed down those behind him to allow Hulkenberg to gain an advantage.
“At that point we already had a 10-second penalty for contact with Albon,” he said. “So, as soon as we found out, we also knew that Kevin was now out of the fight for the points. That's why he supported us to give Nico a point. And I make no apologies for this strategy.”
“In terms of creating gaps, it's a standard thing. It's not the norm, but it's the most obvious thing and if you don't do it, you're not doing your job well. It's obvious what we had to do. The only possibility that we had was with Nico. Any other team would have done the same thing. And if someone says, 'No, no, that's unsportsmanlike,' that's all bullshit.”
Having accepted that Magnussen should hand back his seat, Komatsu said the team would now have more people working at its Banbury facility during races, monitoring onboard footage of its cars and listening to rivals' radios.
This will allow the team to have a better chance of telling their drivers to give back a position if it was won unfairly.
“We have put internal measures in place to make sure that if the same thing happens again, we can figure it out right away,” he said. “It's our job to monitor the situation, which we haven't done. But we are too spread out in terms of the team and have limited resources.”
“We're not like other teams, who have the control mission or whatever they call it. They have a lot of people who control everything and have everyone's conversations. We can't do that. But at least now we have a couple of people constantly following the onboard of each pilot, also listening to the radio of those who are fighting with ours”.
“Listening back to Tsunoda, he immediately said that Kevin had gone off the track. So, if we had looked at the onboards and listened to Yuki we would have noticed immediately. You have a very small window to recover a position, but there is no doubt that we should have do it. The mistake was not to have noticed it immediately. We cannot repeat the same mistake.”
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