Haas to flip the switch on its own simulator by early summer — and it’s a bigger deal than it sounds
Haas has spent the last year quietly upgrading the bits you don’t see on TV. The next brick in that rebuild clicks into place in May or June, when the team’s first in-house simulator goes live at Banbury.
For Haas, that’s transformational. Until now, race prep and development work have leaned on Ferrari’s simulator in Maranello — handy, but hardly seamless for a team whose engineering base is in the UK and whose access is naturally limited. The new rig, born from the team’s growing partnership with Toyota, is about bringing that work home.
“I think the Banbury one is going to be up and running around May, June time,” team principal Ayao Komatsu said. “We’re doing our proof-of-concept model integration in parallel with another simulator Toyota has in Epsom. So once the physical one is installed in Banbury, we can just go. It should be immediately okay when it’s installed as we’re doing it in parallel.”
That parallel path is an important detail. Simulator programs live and die by correlation: how faithfully what the drivers feel in the virtual world maps to what the car does on track. Komatsu’s point is that Haas won’t be waiting for months of teething problems once the Banbury rig is bolted down; the integration work is already happening.
And the timing matters. With the 2026 rules switch coming — chassis, aero and power unit packaging all being overhauled — simulator reliance goes up, not down. You don’t want to be begging for days in someone else’s room when you’re trying to learn a brand-new car at race pace.
“It’s very important,” Komatsu said of bringing the sim in-house. “We’ve got access to a Ferrari simulator in Maranello. But of course, it’s not great, because most of the engineering teams are in the UK, and then the days are limited, and it’s in Italy. Logistically, it’s been pretty difficult.”
Haas has never pretended to be the best-funded operation in the pit lane. But the difference since Komatsu took the reins in 2024 has been a clear-eyed focus on the foundations: structure, tools, process. The Toyota tie-up announced in October 2024 is the headline piece, and not just because Toyota Gazoo Racing will become Haas’s title sponsor from 2026. It’s the access to people, facilities and know-how that’s changing Haas’ day-to-day.
Komatsu is adamant the collaboration is about building capability, not laying the groundwork for a Toyota F1 works effort or a future power unit project.
“Between Akio-san [Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda] and myself, it’s totally clear that the purpose of this collaboration is really trying to grow people and, through doing that, they will make a competitive organisation,” he said. “If somebody wants to train people, or throw people into a very competitive, international environment, there’s nothing better than Formula 1.
“In the corporate world, certain things take, let’s say, three months to develop; in Formula 1, we sort it in two weeks. In terms of training people, I don’t think you’ll find anything better. That’s where our synergy comes from. We are looking for people. Akio-san was looking for an environment where he could train and grow his own people.”
That’s the telling bit. Toyota doesn’t need F1 branding exercises; it needs leaders used to making fast, high-stakes decisions. F1 is a pressure cooker that forges exactly that. Haas, meanwhile, gains depth and tools — like the simulator — that shrink the gap to the midfield’s best-prepared teams.
Strip away the boardroom talk and the benefit is simple. With a Banbury sim up and running, Haas engineers can iterate set-ups on Tuesday, bolt on updates in the model on Wednesday, run drivers through new run-plans on Thursday, and still have time to chase correlation before the freight leaves. That kind of rhythm is how you stop firefighting and start planning.
For a team that’s often been defined by what it didn’t have, this is a rare moment when Haas can say it’s catching up behind the scenes before the rules reset hits. And in this sport, the quiet upgrades often matter most.
