Guenther Steiner’s meme-worthy rants might have led ‘Drive to Survive’ to instant popularity, but he could not lead Haas to success. The Italian acted as the Team Principal of the North Caroline-based outfit for 8 long F1 seasons between 2016 and 2023. During this time, the best spot that Haas could get in the World Championship standings is P5. Among other things, Guenther also got into internal conflicts with Haas’ owner Gene Haas, and he finally bowed out of the team in 2023.

Taking the reigns of Haas at the start of this year, Ayao Komatsu had already made his stand quite clear. The Japanese had said, “Of course, I’m not trying to be Guenther Steiner! He’s a very different person.” Well, Komatsu has already proven this by leading Haas to get the team’s best results in the last 5 years. As of now, Haas stands at the seventh position in the rankings and it still has 11 races left in this season to improve even further.

Naturally, the scores show that Komatsu has done a better job at leading Haas in these 6 months than Steiner did during his tenure. But every time Guenther Steiner was asked about why his team could not improve, he said that he did not have enough funds at his disposal. Now, Ayao Komatsu has contradicted the ex-Haas Team Principal’s reasoning. He said to AMuS, “We had exactly the same budget last year. It’s just a matter of how you use that money and how you get people to work towards a common goal.”

When Guenther Steiner and Haas parted ways quite abruptly last year, several rumors suggested a falling out between the Italian and Gene Haas over monetary issues. But what did Ayao Komatsu say about securing funds for the team from Gene?

Ayao Komatsu reveals he had to ‘earn Gene Haas’ trust’ for money

Every F1 team has to spend millions of dollars on its operations to build the best car. However, according to Guenther Steiner, he could never get his Haas car to improve because he lacked the money for it. Now, Steiner’s successor, Ayao Komatsu, has proved him wrong by showing much better results with the same budget that Gene Haas had allocated for Haas last year. And he has also revealed how he got Gene to pay for the improvements.

Komatsu said, “Gene has no problem investing in the team if we deliver at the end. We obviously had to earn his trust and prove to him that we could improve with the resources we had.” In fact, his team is now performing better than Alpine–the French team that landed a massive $256 million investment last year from Ryan Reynolds’ Otro Capital. This just shows how Ayao Komatsu has successfully allocated funds to make Haas competent once again.

2025 will be a make-or-break year for Haas. The team will swap its existing driver line-up for two new faces–Esteban Ocon and Oliver Bearman. Do you think Komatsu will be successful in leading his new recruits to even higher success for next year’s campaign? Let us know in the comments.