Haas overachieved compared to its pre-season targets in 2024 despite the late season disappointment of losing out to Alpine for sixth in the constructors’ championship, according to team principal Ayao Komatsu.
Alpine’s double-podium result in Brazil proved crucial as it picked up 33 of its 65 points in one race at Interlagos, helping it beat Haas in the standings. With Haas seventh ahead of RB, Williams and Stake, Komatsu said the way the final results panned out do not overshadow the progress made during his first season in charge.
“Of course we were very disappointed not to get P6, but we gave it everything and it doesn’t just happen at one event, it happens over the course of the season, over the 24 races obviously,” Komatsu told SiriusXM. “So in the end, considering where we’ve come from, we’ve done a very good job to get to P7 with so many points.
“In the end we scored 58 points, and if you look at the last quarter of the season we scored 27, which never happened before. We always would score in the first several races or up to midway, but hardly score any points in the second half of the season because we couldn’t develop the car. But we put that right, we developed the car throughout the season very, very well, and our car got faster and faster and faster.
“The Abu Dhabi qualifying session was the closest we’ve been to pole position – three tenths – and Nico [Hulkenberg] was only eight hundredths from P2. So there’s lots to be positive about, and I’m happy that people recognize that in the team and are happy that we overachieved what we set out to do earlier this year.”
Komatsu said he would definitely have signed up for a seventh-place finish in the standings at the start of the season, given what he had set the team as a goal for 2024.
“100%, because the official target for the team was P8,” he said. “We had to set a target, right? We don’t want to be dead last, and P8 was a realistic target that we set to everyone. I remember in January I said ‘If we achieve P8 at the end of the season we’ve done very, very well, because who are we going to beat?’ You need to beat two teams, who else are we going to beat?
“We are the smallest team, we started this year’s car late and stopped for a couple of months to do the Austin upgrade last year, so we stated from a pretty negative place. How are we going to get to P8? That was the challenge we set ourselves, and honestly I think the boys and girls did an amazing job, so I’m very pleased.”
