Formula One's Smallest Team Explains Its Push to Make American F1 History
No one would argue Ayao Komatsu is the most physically imposing figure in Formula One. The Haas team principal certainly won't tower over anybody in the paddock, even in a sport not known for its tall personalities. But that didn't keep him from adopting rugby as a hobby, one that he carried with him from his native Japan to the United Kingdom.
His size also never impacted the way he approached playing one of the most physical sports on the planet.
"When I'm the smallest guy and this massive guy's running at me and maybe I don't feel like tackling this guy," Komatsu tells Sports Illustrated. "But if I don't tackle this guy, I hold my teammates down."
In many ways that's been the same mentality of Haas, which has come to embody Komatsu's tackle-the-massive-guy ethos over the past two-plus seasons. F1's smallest team is punching well above its weight, currently sitting in fourth in the constructors' standings through the first three races-the highest position any American team has been in the sport's history.
It's early but it's no small feat for an outfit that's run in the bottom half of F1 for nearly the entirety of its decade-long existence. It also comes with a certain pressure to stay there as Haas returns to the track this weekend at the Miami Grand Prix.
Haas's ascension begins with covering the basics
Fans may have had more than a month away from watching the world's highest level of racing, but Komatsu is quick to point out that there was no such thing for Haas. As the sport's smallest team at just around 400 people, there's very little time for a real break. But Komatsu welcomed the five weeks away to encourage his team to "take a breather, but not have a rest" and gain a better understanding of why exactly the results have gone Haas's way in the early going.
Komatsu suggests there's no one reason to point to and nothing in particular about F1's controversial regulations that have suited the team. Much of the success relied on focusing on the basics: hitting every timeline precisely during the preseason in order to arrive on the opening day in Barcelona at 9 a.m. local time ready to put a car on track. It sounds simple, but not every team was ready to do so and the trickle-down effect has lingered into the opening stages of the season, something teams like Aston Martin have become all too keenly aware of through the first three races.
It was during those preseason tests, particularly in Bahrain that Haas made a breakthrough. Ollie Bearman tells SI that something wasn't quite right during the opening day of testing, but key staff was on hand trackside to dissect the issues. The team made tweaks to the car going into Day 2, and again before the third and final day in Bahrain. Just "small changes" Bearman says, but it was at that point that the car "suddenly came alive."
"I think everybody slept a bit easier after the first night," Bearman says.
"It transformed the car and is something I've never seen before in my 10 years of experience in F1," teammate Esteban Ocon adds.
Haas took what it could out of the weekend and applied it before the team's arrival in Melbourne for the season opener, Komatsu says. And what did Haas do when it got there? Execute the most fundamental process in F1: finish the race.
Bearman finished in seventh and Ocon landed just outside of the points-earning positions in 11th, but both improved from where they started on the grid. After earning another point in the first sprint race of the year in China, Bearman finished fifth in the Grand Prix, the second-best result of his F1 career after Mexico City last season.
Both outings were impressive, especially for a young driver who won't turn 21 until the week after the Miami Grand Prix. More importantly, Haas was reliable. In Melbourne, only 16 of 22 drivers were running when the checkered flag waved. In Shanghai, that number dropped to 15 with four drivers failing to even start.
And Komatsu is quick to point that out. Yes, Haas has done things right, from aerodynamic and power unit standpoints, in the development of the car. The team is also doing what it's supposed to.
"Be there when some people retire or cannot even start the race, like in China," Komatsu says. "So it was clear that we've got to be there to take advantage of [scoring opportunities], which we've done."
Haas has been building up to this moment
That's not to undersell what Komatsu has built as Haas during his tenure as team principal, a position he began in January 2024 following the dismissal of Drive to Survive darling Guenther Steiner. Komatsu, who was previously the director of engineering, inherited a team that finished dead last the previous season and scored just 12 points across 22 race weekends. Since coming into the paddock in 2016, Haas has never finished higher than fifth in the constructors' standings and has finished ninth or tenth in four of its ten seasons.
| YEAR | CONSTRUCTORS' STANDINGS FINISH |
|---|---|
| 2016 | 8 |
| 2017 | 8 |
| 2018 | 5 |
| 2019 | 9 |
| 2020 | 9 |
| 2021 | 10 |
| 2022 | 8 |
| 2023 | 10 |
| 2024 | 7 |
| 2025 | 8 |
Komatsu immediately hit the ground running, determined to take what he could from his previous stops around the F1, which included chief performance engineer at Lotus and race engineer at Renault before spending the past 10 seasons with Haas. He established relationships and developed a deep understanding of the keys to building a team, including how to run one when he got the opportunity.
That experience included how to manage drivers, and Komatsu decided to shake up the team's forward-facing figures in his second season on the job. He opted for familiarity, not necessarily experience, with Bearman, who first drove a Haas in 2023 at the age of 18. Ocon brought far more to the table, having been a fixture in the paddock for the better part of the past decade, but also knew Komatsu since he was 13 years old and trying to break into the highest ranks of racing.
It's that familiarity that helped establish perhaps the most important relationship in F1, from driver to team principal. For Haas, that relationship has been a fruitful one.
"From time to time you have to have hard conversations, right? Both ways," Komatsu says of the dynamic. "We cannot not deal with those problems. We've got to put everything on the table, deal with it head-on, but in the right manner."
Komatsu credits working with Hulkenberg for giving him a template for how to work with a driver. And that's just a recent example of how the 50-year-old team principal, who's spent nearly half of his life in F1, takes bits of experience from each of his stops and applies them to how he runs Haas today.
Komatsu's upbringing got him here
That includes experiences outside of the paddock. In addition to (of course) his time on the rugby pitch, Komatsu says he often draws from his childhood in Japan, particularly as a self-proclaimed rebel.
"When I was in junior high school I was a bit rebellious but that's because I was very not happy with how Japanese education was working," he explains. "The teachers were very authoritative and then if some kids were curious and asked certain questions, they got shut down."
But now Komatsu tries to foster the opposite environment, where those in the room will be heard if they're "putting hands up." It's part of what's led to a collaborative nature within Haas and also a steady amassing of talent among the top technical team. Andrea de Zordo stayed on as chief technical director, while Laura Mueller (Ocon) and Ronan O'Hare (Bearman) arrived as race directors for the respective drivers. Francesco Nenci took over as chief race engineer as yet another experienced figure to form the backbone of the Haas brain trust.
"The five to 10 people that are directly influencing what's happening, and of course there are 350 people who are directly influencing, but the core team, it's the best that I've seen," Bearman says.
That's not to say it's been entirely smooth sailing in 2026. Crashes come with the territory in F1 and while the drivers adjust to the new cars, there's an increased chance at mishaps. Bearman learned that in Suzuka, when he tried to overtake Franco Colapinto with a full dose of power, but the Alpine driver was without significant energy at the time. Bearman swung his Haas wide into the grass and carried significant speed across the gravel and into the wall at more than 50G.
Though not exactly the impetus for a tweak to the regulations, Bearman's crash emphasized the need to change just three races into F1's new rules period. Drivers consider them to be a step in the right direction, but ones that won't greatly impact the yo-yo style of racing that's been the primary subject of discussion around the paddock in the days leading up to the Miami Grand Prix.
Bearman, who says the worst outcome of the crash was a bruised knee that prevented him from cycling as much as he hoped over the last five weeks, admits that the hiatus was well-timed, and although he would have been able to race in Bahrain, the weeks off allowed him to recover fully. He said he spent more time driving in the simulator than he would have normally during April because of the lack of races on the calendar.
Haas ready to fight for more
"Ollie has huge potential"
- Formula 1 (@F1) March 26, 2026
Ayao Komatsu talks on how he's aiming high with Haas with his current drivers, on the Beyond The Grid podcast https://t.co/Iy4Oa0BvCP#F1pic.twitter.com/JYEIwcGTNj
But even with Bearman off to the best start of his F1 career and Ocon having nabbed his first point of the year in Japan, Haas is determined not to say put. After all, not pushing the envelope in F1 means you're actually moving backward.
That said, both Komatsu and Ocon confirmed there won't be a major package of upgrades to the car in Miami-and the official FIA announcement revealed just a single tweak for the team this weekend. A more significant change is due in the coming weeks, but Haas will have to maintain its place in the pecking order as the other midfield teams around them arrive determined to take a step forward.
"It's almost like we have to take it as the start of the season again," Ocon says.
The other 10 teams will approach the weekend the same way, eager to gain the upper hand for the rest of 2026. Whether Haas can continue to take on the "massive guys" of the sport remains to be seen, but it's clear that Komatsu won't shy away from the fight.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Formula One's Smallest Team Explains Its Push to Make American F1 History.
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This story was originally published May 1, 2026 at 1:05 PM.