Cautious optimism at Haas heading into 2024 F1 season?

The 2023 Formula 1 season began with Guenther Steiner, one of the sport’s bigger personalities, still at the helm of Haas as they looked to fight up the table.

The 2024 season begins with Steiner on the outside looking in, having been sacked ahead of the year and replaced by Ayao Komatsu.

Despite some hopes of a finish higher up the table — and qualifying pace that made such a finish appear possible — Haas limped to a tenth-place finish last year, that qualifying pace having been undone by struggles with tire management on Sundays.

Now, as the team looks ahead to the Bahrain Grand Prix, there is some hope that three days of pre-season testing in Bahrain have helped the team solve the issues that plagued them a season ago.

“First and foremost, the overall objective of pre-season testing was to improve our race performance and race tire degradation management which was the key weakness from last year, so we totally focused on that,” described Komatsu in the team’s media preview.

“On the first day, we managed to make pretty good progress, both in terms of car set-up and the driving side of things. On day two, we still focused on tire management but also focused on giving direction to the aero team for future development, which we really need to get right this year,” added the new boss at Haas. “We did that well, so entering into day three – it wasn’t always in our plan to do a quali sim – we made enough progress for me to have the confidence to say we could look at our low-fuel performance as well. At the same time, in terms of reliability and looking at the race simulation, that’s what we’ve been focusing on.”

Komatsu noted that the team achieved their main objective in pre-season testing, and can now focus on making sure their race pace matches their qualifying prowess.

“As an overview, I think we achieved our original objective of understanding tire performance, giving a direction to the aero team for the future development plan, and then signing off on qualifying performance and reliability. I think the way we worked during testing, focusing first on race performance, then working on qualifying, that’s how we’re going to continue,” added Komatsu. “So in FP1, FP2 and FP3, we’re not going to throw away what we learned from here, we’ve got the fundamental bases here, so next week will be more about fine-tuning and then maybe 2/3 getting a better compromise between qualifying and the race. Last year, we could qualify P8, but we knew we wouldn’t race there, so we can tune that.”

Both Kevin Magnussen and Nico Hülkenberg, their returning drivers for the 2024 campaign, are looking ahead to the season with a positive viewpoint. How positive? The drivers are now trying not to raise expectations ahead of the Bahrain Grand Prix.

“We can be happy about testing. The objective was to work on long runs with high-fuel, racing-related stuff addressing our main issue from last year, and I think we’ve made progress,” declared Magnussen. “I don’t want to raise expectations – I think we still have a lot of work to do – but we’ve gotten somewhere with the work we’ve done over the winter and these days at testing.”

“Overall, pre-season testing was good and positive. It’s always difficult, I don’t want to get too excited or overenthusiastic, but we’ve definitely made an improvement in certain areas where we were struggling last year. That’s good to see and feel, but that was very much needed,” added Hülkenberg. “It’s too early to say where we are in the field, but it was a fun few days, and was successful from a testing execution and reliability point of view. I’m looking forward to getting the season started, I’m curious to see how it all plays out.”

While it might be too early to say where Haas truly is in the field, Magnussen notes that the atmosphere around the team is much more positive, something he has not seen at Haas in a while.

“I’m looking forward to seeing where we’ll be in the race, that’s always the final test to see if we’ve made progress or not,” added Magnussen. “Everyone’s in good spirits, there’s a really good atmosphere in the team and an atmosphere I haven’t felt for a while.”

A year ago Haas came away empty handed in the Bahrain Grand Prix, as Magnussen finished in P13 and Hülkenberg in P15.

Could a better result, and maybe even some points, be on offer for the team this week?