by VALERIO BARRETTA
The Haas Surprise
Especially in the first part of the 2024 World Championship, the grid was split in half between the top-5 teams and the “others”. Among the latter, the first to collect points was Haas in Jeddah, with Kevin Magnussen who was not interested in his own race in order to slow down the riders behind and favor his teammate Nico Hulkenbergtenth at the end of the GP.
Over the course of the season, Haas finished in the top 10 on five other weekends, and overall only RB did better (34 points against 27). According to team principal Ayao Komatsuthere are more faults of the competition than merits of Haas. A team that, according to its predictions, should have been the last in the “starting grid”, but that has been able to work well unlike others.
Komatsu’s words
“I would never lie. We are by far the smallest team, and if you think logically you can’t get anything other than tenth place.“, these are his words to Cars, Motors and Sports. “What happened is obvious: the others were wrong.. Our car at the start of the season was nothing special, it was logical to think that the others would have done a better job with three times the number of employees. However, Sauber had problems with pit stops, Williams with the chassis, Alpine with developments and weight.“.
Haas has already brought three major packages this year (China/Imola, Monaco and Silverstone), and For the Banbury team, the news won’t stop herealso because these updates will also be valid for 2025, when this cycle of cars will stop: “We will have more updates, for sure. Of course we have to find a balance between the further development this year and the development of the VF-25. And we also have to keep an eye on 2026. We are the smallest team in the industry and therefore we cannot work in parallel like the others.. A lot of the current car can be carried forward to next year, that’s why we don’t want to stop development now.“.
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