Haas workforce boss Ayao Komatsu has revealed that the US outfit’s focus this week in Bahrain won’t be on outright efficiency however on tackling its Achilles’ heel from final season: tyre degradation
Final 12 months, Haas achieved some promising performances in qualifying, however the workforce’s VF-23 constantly dropped down the order throughout races on account of its incapacity to successfully handle tyre put on.
This inconsistency considerably hampered the workforce’s progress and left Haas on the backside of the constructors’ championship.
Haas has integrated adjustments into its new VF-24 with the categorical objective of enhancing tyre administration. Pre-season testing in Bahrain due to this fact turns into an important proving floor for these modifications.
As a substitute of experimenting with numerous efficiency setups, the workforce will dedicate its three days of testing to gathering information and evaluating the effectiveness of their options.
“It is probably not a lot evaluating the variations throughout the specs, however should you have a look at our problem final 12 months, it was clear that on Sunday we simply couldn’t handle the tyres for 300 kilometres,” commented Komatsu, quoted by Motorsport.com. “In order that’s what we’re targeted on.
“Our Bahrain take a look at programme is totally targeted on producing the related information in order that our engineers can perceive what’s occurring to the automobile and what’s occurring to the tyres.
“Then we are able to resolve, if we’ve got good high quality information, on the conclusion of the right way to enhance it. Then we resolve a distinct route on that.”
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Komatsu believes that Haas has the stable basis it wants to hold itself up the sector, though progress is a long-term goal.
“The short-term goal actually is to make incremental enhancements,” he added. “As I’ve mentioned earlier than, I imagine we’ve received good components and we’ve received good folks within the workforce, however we’ve actually received to give attention to the workforce being as one to make these enhancements.
“Lengthy-term clearly comes on account of that, so as an illustration, our first ‘medium-term’ objective is to improve to a automobile that works, and that has occurred earlier than so I imagine we are able to do it.”
Wholesale aero adjustments carried out on Haas’ VF-23 on the US Grand Prix in Austin final 12 months, whereas their influence was minimal, served to place the workforce on the suitable improvement path for 2024.
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With a selected plan of action now set, Kevin Magnussen hopes Haas can proceed with a improvement route that instills consistency and in the end pushes the workforce ahead.
“The replace was extra of an experiment final 12 months,” defined the Dane. “It’s onerous to name it an replace or improve as a result of it wasn’t actually upwards, it was simply sideways, but it surely was an excellent experiment when it comes to committing to the idea of automobile that we’ve got this 12 months.
“I feel we wished to see the potential and traits on monitor with this idea of automobile, and this 12 months is in that route.
“I hope we are able to take a step ahead. We dedicated to this 12 months’s automobile fairly late in improvement, so we’ve had fairly a short while to develop, and it’s truly been going fairly effectively.
“Though I don’t suppose we are able to assure that it’s a step ahead straightaway in Bahrain on the first race, I feel the event appears extra fascinating at the very least.”
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