As the F1 2025 season approaches, we’re beginning to learn more about the design and development philosophies on display from teams up and down the grid — and things will look different for Haas this year.

As a Ferrari customer team, Haas has historically purchased its engine and other components from the Maranello team. But Ayao Komatsu has revealed that in 2025, they’ll be foregoing Ferrari’s front suspension in favour of their own.

Haas to continue developing its front suspension

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

During a brunch with Ayao Komatsu, Haas’ team principal, revealed several new details about the team’s incoming 2025 challenger came to light.

Understandably, Komatsu was reluctant to offer too much info about the development of the car. As media prodded him on whether or not the new machine would be a radical redesign, he offered a brief story to illustrate how not all changes are visible to the eye.

“When Gene [Haas] says, oh, look at what the other guy is doing — the visible bit is only a small part of the story,” Komatsu said.

“I remember Gene telling me in Silverstone, he was walking up and down the grid and he said, ‘Oh, you know, everybody’s got different solutions.’

“But that’s only the top surface. The bit underneath the floor that you cannot see, that’s where the tricks are.

“If you think the car is radically different, that’s up to you. In terms of concept, it’s an evolution of what we’ve been learning throughout the year.”

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Komatsu did admit that Haas will have a new monocoque heading into 2025.

“We were developing the car pretty well last year but there are certain limitations that we had to accept,” he explained.

“And then things we learned, say, mid-season about how to unlock certain performance — even what we wanted to do for Austin, we couldn’t. Or even Silverstone.

“But we couldn’t do it because of the monocoque design, the chassis design. So that’s something we decided how we want to change for this year’s car.”

The 2025 machine will have more freedom on offer for Haas to develop the car as it sees fit. That seems to be a promising move, considering how much improvement the team saw last year; having greater freedom to implement upgrades will be a boon.

But Komatsu also admitted something fascinating. Haas, as a Ferrari customer team, has often relied upon the Maranello outfit to provide both its engines and critical suspension parts. For 2025, Haas is taking a different route.

“We always went with Ferrari’s latest supply — and not because that was an informed choice, because that was the safest and easiest choice,” Komatsu said.

He noted that several members of Haas’ design, development, and performance teams actually ran studies this year to analyze the benefit of taking on Ferrari’s latest front suspension, or of continuing to develop the front suspension they used last year.

Komatsu pointed out that when implementing new technology, his team would take an “error hit” — meaning Haas would take a hit to performance as it adapted to the new machinery.

“You have to recover, and then [see] how much potential that unlocks, comparing that against [what happens if you] don’t stop development, because we carried over the front suspension. How much potential is left in that?” he explained.

“They’ve done a proper study, then the conclusion was we should do a carryover,” Komatsu said.

“It’s good that we’ve done a proper study; then we had confidence to then go for that decision, whereas before we didn’t.”

Critically for Ferrari — whose 2025 car has been nicknamed ‘Project 677’ — this means that it will also have less data regarding the performance of the front suspension, as it will be running that suspension on fewer cars.

But for Haas, it shows a continued evolution of the developmental mindset brought to the team by Ayao Komatsu.

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