Haas F1 Team Principal Ayao Komatsu Opens Up About Surviving 10 Years of Formula 1 Racing

Ayao Komatsu on 10 Years of Racing at Haas F1 Kym Illman - Getty Images Haas F1 team principal Ayao Komatsu rarely thinks about himself alone. Despite his promotion from race engineer to team principal in 2024, Komatsu said he doesn't absorb the pressure on his own. Instead, the 10-year Haas F1 veteran is steadily focused on the bigger picture of maintaining the team's consistency.

But it wasn't always this way. Komatsu has worked in Formula 1 for most of his life, and he has been with Haas since the beginning. After following Romain Grosjean from Lotus to the American-born F1 startup in 2016, Komatsu acted as the team's track-side engineering director until his promotion to team principal in 2024.

While modern impressions of Haas F1 circle around on strong mid-pack results and the cultivation of promising young talent, Komatsu said they were fighting to survive in the early days. Jayce Illman - Getty Images "When we started ten years ago, we had virtually zero supporting functionality. One day, I was writing an email summarizing all the things we were doing, and I stopped halfway through the email and thought, 'Who am I sending this to?

' Nobody would be receiving it, and I just sent it to myself because I was just excited to do it all," Komatsu said in an interview with Road & Track . "By the time we finished building a car [at] Dallara in Italy, everybody was dead. My other fellow engineer was completely conked out in my passenger seat.