F1 News: Haas opted against new Ferrari suspension for ’25
(GMM) Haas opted to produce its own front suspension for the 2025 car rather than simply buy Ferrari’s all-new pullrod design.
The small American team had an odd pre-season test in Bahrain, opting against performance runs to instead circulate slower than the competition on high fuel loads.
Team boss Ayao Komatsu said: “Our new car has retained the good qualities of the old one.”
With that in mind, he said trying to get a quicker lap time was pointless.
“What good is it to me if I know today whether we’re fifth or eighth?” said the Japanese. “I can’t change anything until Melbourne because we won’t have any new parts by then.”
A big change for Haas in 2025, however, is that the team will be operating at the actual limit of the budget cap for the very first time.
“We know where we want to spend the extra money, but we have to learn how to do it,” Komatsu is quoted as saying by Auto Motor und Sport.
“We will end up with 350 employees and still hit the budget ceiling. But that is inefficient. Other teams have 900 employees and stay within the limit.
“We still have to learn how to spend our money efficiently – for example, how many parts should we buy at a set price and how many should we produce ourselves?”
The answer for the suspension is that the rear layout is fully supplied by Ferrari for the 2025 Haas – but the team has made its own front suspension.
“The price would have been that we would have received the data from Ferrari for the front end very late,” Komatsu revealed.
“We would have lost too much time for the aerodynamic development. The bottom line would have been a disadvantage for us.”
He said it’s a totally different story for the rear end.
“The (Ferrari) rear is a great advantage for the car,” said Komatsu. “It was obvious that we buy it from Ferrari.”
The result of Haas’ 2025 choices is that the car is now visually very different to the basic Ferrari concept, including the nose, front wing, sidepods and cooling layout.
