Haas makes “huge” changes to F1 team personnel ahead of new season

Haas has significantly altered its Formula 1 race team staff ahead of the new season, with changes in driver engineers, strategy and sporting operations personnel alongside the arrival of Esteban Ocon and Oliver Bearman.

Team principal Ayao Komatsu said the alterations represented a “huge change” for Haas, as he briefed the F1 press corps ahead of the new season.

Topping the bill of the changes to the American team’s racing structure are the two race engineers that Komatsu has promoted from their previous roles as performance engineers at Haas.

These are Laura Mueller, who will be Ocon’s race engineer, and Ronan O'Hare, who will work with Bearman.

Mueller has worked for Haas since joining the team in her first F1 role as a simulator engineer, while O’Hare has worked as a performance engineer for Williams and the NIO Formula E team (now Cupra Kiro), as well as holding other engineering roles for Racing Bulls and Mercedes.

Haas has also hired its first head of race strategy – Carine Cridelich, who will join the team on 1 March from her current post at the RB squad.

Ex-Toyota, Sauber and Marussia engineer Francesco Nenci joined Haas this month as chief race engineer, which was Komatsu’s role before he replaced Guenther Steiner as team principal this time a year ago.

Francesco Nenci, Toyota Engineer

Photo by: Sutton Images

Mark Lowe has been appointed as Haas’s first sporting director, with previous team manager Peter Crolla having left the squad recently.

“Our technical team – the factory-based technical team – has been really stable,” Komatsu told select media, including Motorsport.com, in an interview on Monday.

This part of the team remains unchanged, with Andrea De Zordo, Tom Coupland and Jonathan Heal remaining in their respective posts as technical director and chief and deputy designer.

“What’s been changed is the trackside team,” Komatsu continued. “It’s a huge change, but I felt that was one of the weakest areas last year. The more and more the car became competitive, that exposed it more.

“We left too many points on the table from the trackside operations. So, we really needed to step up on that one.”

Komatsu said examples of Haas losing points in 2024 – including the season opener in Bahrain, where Kevin Magnussen lost a potential points finish getting undercut at the first stops by then Sauber driver Zhou Guanyu – led him to enact the changes revealed this week.

Ayao Komatsu, Team Principal, Haas F1 Team

Photo by: Lubomir Asenov / Motorsport Images

The team was on course to finish sixth in the 2024 constructors’ championship, having been 10th and last the year before, but was pipped by Alpine by just seven points.

“Just so many times under pressure we didn’t seem to function as well as we should,” Komatsu added. “But, again, it’s not just about the people but in terms of the amount of training we can give etc.”

On this, Haas has just completed its first Testing of Previous Cars (TPC) running, with a session in Jerez last weekend attended by Ocon and Bearman, plus Toyota driver Ritomo Miyata.

Komatsu said this was “so important” for training its new and remaining trackside staff, as before “we were just a race team”.

He added: “But now we have those [private tests in cars at least two years old], and also capabilities to simulate certain scenarios now.

“We have a lot more of that before the season starts. We will be better prepared.”

When asked by Motorsport.com if Haas had also assessed outside candidates to install as race engineers in place of Gary Gannon – now working at Aston Martin – and Mark Slade, who also left Haas at the end of 2024, Komatsu confirmed it had before settling on a policy of promoting from within.

“It’s just pros and cons,” he said. “Because outside people have got long notice periods as well.

“It’s just everything. If there is somebody where it’s like, ‘wow, this guy is a perfect fit and we should wait for 12 months or whatever’ then it’s fine.

“But it had to be clearly better than either Laura or Ronan. Because if the external candidate I can see pros and cons, ok they have less experience but in terms of potential if I think in a year’s time they can be almost the same or even better, then I’d rather invest internally.”

Haas is also set to present team owner Gene Haas with a proposal for changes to its Banbury base, which Motorsport.com understands could include moving to a new site altogether, at the end of January.