Yesterday at 10:10
Haas is hoping it can land a multi-million dollar windfall after
deciding to 'press the green button' on rolling out a late-season
boost for this weekend's United States Grand Prix. Aside from
unveiling a tweaked livery for its home race at the Circuit of the
Americas , the VF-25s of Oliver Bearman and Esteban Ocon will also
be sporting an upgrade the team hopes will aid its push in the F1
constructors' championship. Just 26 points split sixth-placed
Racing Bulls from Haas in ninth, with the difference in prize money
between the positions around $30 million, representing a
significant amount for the smaller teams. At this stage, the update
package could be a game-changer for Haas. Assessing what the
upgrades could do for Bearman and Ocon, speaking exclusively to
RacingNews365 , team principal Ayao Komatsu said: "I never want to
count my chickens, shall I say, until it's proven. "But if you look
at how tight the grid is, we lost a P8 [in Singapore Grand Prix
qualifying] by four-hundredths, so even if the upgrade gives us
0.05 seconds, that could make a difference. "Quite often, if you
look at who's out in Q1, who has just made it, it's less than
tenths, so everything matters. "Hopefully it will help us, but I
don't know. We need to test it, evaluate it, and see if we've gone
in the right direction or not. "One thing we shouldn't become is
complacent. So far, everything we've seen has been working, but
we've got to assess it intelligently in Austin without
complacency." Every single thing matters Komatsu conceded, however,
he and his team had to bide their time before deciding whether the
package should be introduced due to budgetary concerns this season.
"Like everybody else, we had to switch to our '26 car reasonably
early, so we had Austin as a possibility," said Komatsu. "Again, we
have had to be careful about the budget cap, of course, and this is
a new experience, in the sense that until this year, we were far
away from the budget cap. This is the first year we will be on the
budget cap. "That means, of course, how much margin do you leave
for accident damage, something unexpected, so that's been tricky.
"We were only going to do it [the upgrade package] if we had to,
but then the point we pressed the green button, it was pretty
obvious. "The field is so tight and every single thing matters, and
that could be the difference between P7, P8, and P9 in the
constructors', so, for me, we had to do it."
