Haas ended last season at the bottom of the championship standings. It has raised its game this year and now lies seventh, just three points off RB.
However Ayao Komatsu, who took over as team principal at the start of the year, said the team needs the boost offered by its new partnership with Toyota to continue competing at this level.
“We are the smallest team on the grid and we are lacking certain resources and hardware capability to understand certain things,” he told media including RaceFans after the deal was announced today.
“In terms of being more competitive in the midfield, we are looking for somebody who can give us more resource and [manpower] and also have the hardware and the know-how to use that hardware,” he explained.
“Toyota Gazoo Racing gives exactly that. They have a great facility in Cologne so we’ll be able to utilise that.”
Haas will collaborate with the former F1 team on developing a new simulator and running a programme for the testing of previous cars, which will be driven by Toyota junior drivers and operated by Haas staff.
“They are looking for that latest F1 know-how and skillset which we have,” said Komatsu. “We don’t have their facilities, we don’t have the number of people, their resource.
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“So that’s how we are tapping into each other’s expertise and then learning in the areas that we are weak relative to each other. So it’s really a perfect combination to have the mutual benefit.”
One key benefit Haas was able to offer Toyota was the opportunity to run its junior drivers by taking advantage of F1’s Testing of Previous Cars (TPC) rules as other teams do. This will also help Haas develop its F1 personnel.
“TPC is very important in terms of training our personnel,” Komatsu explained. “We have just over 300 people, we have no contingency in personnel. So if one race engineer or one performance engineer decides to leave or is having a problem and not able to attend a race, we are really struggling. We’re on the limit all the time.
“In order to improve the organisation you cannot be at the kind of survival stage as a baseline. We’ve got to build up the organisation. So through TPC we can start training our engineers, our mechanics, having back-up people.
“Of course the budget cap makes it more complicated in a way that we’ve got to…
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