Ayao Komatsu reflects on his 10 years with Haas F1, highlighting his promotion to team principal in 2024 and the team's early struggles for survival. He emphasizes a focus on the bigger picture rather than individual pressure.
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Ayao Komatsu on 10 Years of Racing at Haas F1Kym 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.
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"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. I felt like we'd done the whole winter testing and pre-season testing, and I realized we haven't even done a week."
Modern F1 is a massive, expensive enterprise, but it has not necessarily always been a money-maker. That meant the team was worried about survival in a way that does not necessarily concern newer teams. "Gene came into Formula 1 when it was nothing like this. He came in when Formula 1 was nowhere near as lucrative as this," Komatsu said. "He stuck with us, and he had a good business model to start with. So many new teams just failed. They normally go bankrupt or vanish within two years. Normally, they don't even survive two years.
In the early years, Haas F1 struggled for survival, requiring Komatsu to focus on maintaining the team's consistency amid significant pressure.
Ayao Komatsu was promoted to team principal of Haas F1 in 2024 after serving as the team's track-side engineering director.
Ayao Komatsu has been with Haas F1 since its inception in 2016, marking a decade of service in the team.
Under Ayao Komatsu's leadership, Haas F1 is focused on achieving strong mid-pack results and cultivating promising young talent.
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"The model they came up with—this amazing collaboration with Ferrari, and then a collaboration with Dallara, this Italian manufacturing company—meant we had a chance to score points from year one. And that's very important, because if you're not scoring points from the get-go, it's very difficult to attract people; very difficult to make it work as an operation, as well."
His memory of pre-season testing in 2016 is hazy (he cites a lack of sleep), but Komatsu said he did remember the attrition rate at the time; team employees were rapidly departing before the season even started, primarily due to the fatigue and uncertainty of guiding a fledgling F1 team to its start. However, Grosjean managed to place sixth at the Australian Grand Prix in the team's breakout race, a big result that Komatsu said "saved so many people from resignation" and "really helped to keep the team together." Grosjean snagged fifth place the following week in Bahrain, further cementing the team's potential and the majority of its small employee pool.
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"We had an incredible start, and then for the first three years, we improved steadily. But in 2019, we had an issue with the car. We had a fast car in qualifying, but in the race, the car completely ate up the tires," Komatsu said. "At the time, we didn't really address the fundamental issues. And that came back and haunted us in 2023. In my view, it's because we didn't address the fundamental issue of 2019, whether it's the personnel, methodology, or procedure."
"I became team principal in 2024. From that journey onwards, it's like Haas version two, and really making sure we are a proper race team and creating a correct culture—an inclusive, supportive culture without blame and working together as a team."
So far, 2026 has been a knockout season for Haas, as the team currently sits in fourth place after two impressive stints in Australia and China from 20-year-old Ollie Bearman. But his third season as team principal is set to be his most challenging yet, as a new series of regulations has completely upended the grid's approach to power, energy, and aerodynamics. Even with more complex hybrid powertrains and less downforce, Komatsu said the 2026 season is a learning moment that will bring the team together.
"Independently of my position, as a team position, I think that a rule change needed to happen at some point. Because Formula 1 is always the frontier for new technical revolution and evolution. We've had a stable regulation for the last four or five years, and then the competition got so close. It was great. But at some point, Formula 1 had to go to the next step," Komatsu said.
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Those regulations have been most beneficial for the most powerful works operations, Ferrari and Mercedes. While big teams benefit from the extra control of developing a new powertrain and car at the same time, it can be a different challenge for a smaller customer team like Haas.
"Without going into details, the fact that this regulation change is so big normally means that small teams suffer more. The fact that we are competing in this way so far means that our approach has been to be really focused on the basics," he said. "We really worked backwards to understand this new regulation, to get the best out of our car and the driver, because the driver had a lot to learn to get the best out of this new regulation. Being a smaller team means that you have so many constraints, you're almost forced to think about what the priorities are and what the things we can do are."
Even with the regulation changes and demanding schedule, Komatsu appears to be exactly where he wants to be. Formula 1 has been his primary passion for more than two decades now, which grants him the privilege of a unique sort of nostalgia; although Komatsu said he is beyond satisfied in his current position, he added that he misses being a race engineer every once in a while.
"There was one question we had in another event a couple of weeks ago, in London, the last question was to both drivers and myself—if you had any roles in F1, what would you choose? For me, it's race engineering, because I love running a car. I love the close communication with drivers in the moment and managing the car. I think if you can pick anything, race engineering is the best job," Komatsu said. "Part of the job is to get the best out of the car, so that's the engineering and technology bit. Then you have the big part of the driver. How do you get the best out of this driver? That's the much more human side of it—but the interesting thing is that you only get the best performance if that combination of this human being, the driver, and the machinery matches up."
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