Ayao Komatsu, the boss of Haas Formula 1, has called the team’s alleged “unsportsmanlike” behavior during the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix “complete bullshit.”
Kevin Magnussen received a 10-second penalty for contact with Alex Albon at turn 4 on the restart, and he followed it up with another after passing Yuki Tsunoda off track at the same point, ruining his race.
He diligently followed the instructions to reduce his pace in the first sector so that teammate Nico Hulkenberg could pull a gap to that gaggle of cars behind him and emerge in P10 when he boxed.
Albon, who was also held up along with Tsunoda and others, criticized Magnussen’s pass of Tsunoda as “cheeky,” while the RB team deemed Haas’s strategy as “unsportsmanlike” after the race.
Even if it worked out nicely for Haas, Tsunoda said he will discuss the matter with the FIA as he thought Magnussen’s tactics were unfair to the other midfield teams desperately scrapping for a point.
“I mean don’t get me wrong, on the team side, within the current regulations, I think they did well, because in the end they scored points. So I think they maximised it.” he said.
“But at they same time, how they did it, obviously from our side it’s not the way we wanted.
“Obviously the thing is that we’re not happy with it, otherwise everyone just literally can cut the chicane in Monaco and just, hold the whole pack 20 seconds and let their teammate win. So you can’t do that consistently,” he added.
Komatsu claimed that the team would have asked Magnussen give up the position if they had realized that he went off track to pass Tsunoda, yet he confessed that he had no idea.
“I accept criticism,” he said during a media session on Thursday. “The criticism is the fact that we as a team didn’t know that Kevin overtook Tsunoda by going off the track. We just didn’t know that at that time.
“So that’s the criticism I totally accept, we should have known that as a team straight away. And then Kevin should have given the position back by himself anyway. But if he didn’t, as a team, we should have instructed Kevin to give the position back straight away.
“And had we done that, there would be no argument, we would have overtaken Tsunoda anyway, because we had the pace.”
But Komatsu didn’t apologise for how Magnussen slowed the field down so Hulkenberg could get away, believing it’s part of the game in Formula One. A fine example is Sergio Perez backing up Lewis Hamilton at the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix to help Max Verstappen in his title quest.
“At that point we already had a 10-seconds penalty for [contact with] Albon,” he said. “So as soon as we know that we’d got a 10-seconds penalty by Albon, Kevin’s out in terms of fighting for points, right?
“That’s why he backed everybody up to get Nico to score a point. And that strategy, I don’t make any apology.
“In terms of creating a gap, that’s standard. Not standard, but that’s the obvious thing, because if you didn’t do that, you’re not doing your job.”
He added: “It’s obvious what we needed to do. The only chance we had was with Nico. So any team would have done the same. And if somebody says, no, no, that’s unsportsmanlike — it’s complete bullshit.”
After admitting that Magnussen should have given up the position, Komatsu confirmed that they will be staffing their Banbury facility with extra people during races to monitor the onboard TV video of their cars and listen to the radios of their competitors to help get to a quicker decision.
As a result, the team will have more eyes on other cars and radios to remind its drivers to relinquish a position if it has been unfairly obtained.
“We put [measures] into place internally to make sure that if the same thing happens, we can spot it straight away,” he said.
“It’s our job to monitor the situation, which we failed to do. We are just spread out too thin in terms of the team, we’ve just got such limited resources.
“So it’s not like other teams where they’ve got the mission control or whatever they call it. They have so many people monitoring everything, listening to everyone’s conversation.
“We can’t do that. But at least now we put a couple of people in place to follow the onboard of each driver all the time, and whoever our drivers are fighting, listening to the radio.
“Listening back to Tsunoda, he said Kevin went off the road. So if we were doing that with onboards, we should have realised straight away, Tsunoda commenting, we should have realised straight away.
“You’ve got a very small window to give you a position back. But there is no argument, we should have done that.”
Expanding on the new race day factory roles, he added: “We’ve got other people supporting us, it’s not like we’ve got zero people, but they are supporting us in terms of the strategy, in terms of tyre deg, etcetera.
“I’m sure some other bigger teams are listening to everyone’s radio conversation, making transcripts and all sorts of things.
“We just haven’t got capacity to do that. But we have to learn from mistakes. So that mistake was the fact that we didn’t notice that straight away. We cannot make the same mistake again.”
