Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu has revealed he is having "very good conversations" with potential investors as the team continues to be financially outmatched by their Formula 1 rivals. The American outfit, which has been racing in the sport for a decade, remains the only team on the grid whose spending does not reach the annual budget cap.
The cap for the 2026 season stands at just shy of £160 million, excluding driver salaries, the wages of a team's top three earners, and other non-performance-related expenditure such as marketing. Every other F1 team, including newcomers Cadillac, has the resources to spend as close to that cap as they dare without exceeding it.
Haas's size and resources
While many of those organisations have upwards of 1,000 employees, Haas remain by far the smallest outfit in the sport with a headcount of around 400. Komatsu pointed to that as the core reason behind the disappointing direction their season has gone in after a strong start.
Oliver Bearman scored 17 points from the first two race weekends, but the team added only four more across the nine that followed, including zero points scored from any of the last five events. Bearman recently said his team had been "out-developed and overtaken by our competition", but his boss is clear as to why that has happened.
Komatsu's response
Asked if Haas are now able to spend up to the budget cap, Komatsu said: "I wish we can, [but] we're not. It's one of the top priorities on my job list to be able to fund this team so that we can operate at the budget cap. Because that's the baseline, right? We should be achieving that first step.
"We talked about us being outdeveloped. That's not a reflection of, let's say, incapability of our guys. I think our guys are doing, honestly, a fantastic job. Anybody who knows about Formula 1, knowing our size and resource of the team, and then producing what we are producing, I think they will understand this statement.
"I think they are very capable. They work as a team. Their communication is clear. No-blame culture. I think the culture is getting there, and the capability is there. But I'm not, so far, able to give them enough ammunition for our guys to show what they're capable of.
"What they produced at the beginning of this year is completely unexpected. You cannot expect the smallest team to be performing the way that we've been performing beginning of the season in the year of the biggest regulation change. That's not sustainable for us.
"So it's not a reflection of our guys, it's more a reflection on my side. I need to be able to get better revenue to this team and provide a better environment for our guys. Then, once we've done that, we've got the guys to do it. We've got the drivers to do it. So I'm sure we can come back.
"Those things take time. So, I'm really trying to put that in place as soon as possible. But it's not like I just started working on it. We've been working on it. So we're having some very good conversations. But really, honestly, it's not fair on our guys to have that constraint, if you like. It's like they're fighting with both hands tied."
