Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu said he is happy with how the first day of pre-season testing went, and that Haas achieved all its objectives so far.
Already before the start of pre-season testing, Komatsu was honest and admitted that the team didn’t have to expect much, at least at the start of the season. He believes the first improvements will be seen in the long term.
He also added that Haas would be focusing on addressing last year’s weaknesses, such as tire management in the long stints. That is exactly what the American outfit did on the first day.
Both Kevin Magnussen and Nico Hulkenberg used harder compounds of tires (C2 and C3) and completed as many laps as possible to test the consistency of the VF-24.
“For our first day of pre-season testing, overall, I think it was a pretty decent day,” Komatsu said at the end of the day.
“It wasn’t perfect, but it was a really decent start. We focused the whole day on long-run tire management, we generated really good data.
“Both drivers ran a few different strategies, and we can see the results of that. We’ve learned quite a lot as a team. I’d say we managed to achieve most of our objectives for the day, which is good. For tomorrow, we’ve got another big set of objectives – knowing what we’ve learned from today.”
Both Magnussen and Hulkenberg were satisfied with how the day went, saying that the team managed to focus on the things that they wanted to. Of course, they know there are a few things to improve still, but it was a positive start.
“I think we had a pretty positive morning,” Magnussen said. “We just focused on long runs, and we’re really trying to address the issues that we had last year with the tires.
“There’s clearly a lot of work to do, but everyone’s fired up to investigate and learn about this new car.
“It was all good and positive,” continued Hulkenberg. “There were no issues on the technical side, and with 82 laps on the board, everything was achieved.”