Haas left Barcelona with the same takeaway most of the pitlane quietly admitted over coffee: the 2026 cars aren’t going to be “driving themselves” just because the software got smarter. If anything, the new power-unit split – with the MGU-K now contributing 350kW in a near 50/50 partnership with the V6 – has turned energy into a weapon you can accidentally fire at your own feet.
Ayao Komatsu didn’t bother dressing it up. In his view, the penalty for getting deployment wrong isn’t the familiar annoyance of a scruffy sector or a couple of tenths drifting away. It’s big, ugly, and obvious.
“If it were only a tenth, I’d be happy,” he said, before making the point that under these rules the mistake will be written all over the lap. A driver can open a qualifying run down the pit straight and you’ll know instantly whether the system has been used properly or squandered. The new era, Komatsu reckons, is going to create a kind of transparency fans will feel in real time: the “why” might still be buried in the traces, but the “what” will be visible from the grandstands and onboards.
That visibility comes from a simple problem: the cars want to deploy a lot more electric power than they can comfortably earn back in a lap. Esteban Ocon has already described the new generation as likely to be “energy-starved”, and Komatsu agreed with the bluntest version of the message engineers can deliver.
“We’re trying to use and deploy so much electrical energy, but what we can harvest… is really not enough,” he said. Which means you don’t just chase lap time; you budget it. Waste energy at the wrong moment – on an outlap, in a section where it doesn’t translate into meaningful acceleration, or simply by being greedy with throttle – and you’ll arrive at the part of the lap that matters with nothing left to spend.
Komatsu’s warning is that this won’t just cost a sniff of performance. It can be “half a second, six-tenths, seven-tenths” without any dramatic lock-up or snap of oversteer to explain it. The lap will just… bleed.
The mechanics of it are slightly counter-intuitive for drivers trained to lean on instinct. Komatsu described a threshold effect: beyond a certain throttle percentage, the car effectively commits to deploying electrical energy. So the question becomes: do you really want to cross that threshold here?
His example was Baku’s slow castle section. Deploying electrical energy between tight corners can be worse than pointless: it can break traction and, crucially, it burns the battery for no return in top speed. Do it by accident – a touch too much throttle, a moment of impatience – and you’re punished later. By the time you hit the main straight, the energy isn’t there, and you pay the price where lap time is actually made.
Barcelona, he suggested, is a perfect trap because of how it sets up the final corner and the start of a lap. Everyone understands the traditional dilemma there: carry speed out of the last turn or your lap is compromised before it’s even started. But now there’s another layer. Chase that exit speed too aggressively on the outlap and you risk deploying when you shouldn’t, turning your preparation phase into an expensive energy leak that ruins the timed lap anyway. The driver’s demand and the system’s demand don’t always align. “You’ve got to get it right,” Komatsu said, and it didn’t sound like a slogan so much as a survival note.
There’s also a wider implication tucked inside Komatsu’s comments: this regulation set is going to reward teams that can integrate driver feel, control systems and procedure work better than their rivals, especially early on. It’s not simply a case of plugging in a new PU and learning a few new dashboard pages. Komatsu was clear that you can’t separate drivers and engineers here; the performance is in the relationship.
And because energy harvesting is “very condition-dependent” and “driver operation-dependent”, the learning won’t be a neat, linear ramp. One weekend’s competence doesn’t guarantee the next. Komatsu expects vulnerability at the start of the season, not in the sense of cars failing, but in teams simply failing to extract what’s available.
He pointed to the obvious pinch point: even if you arrive in Bahrain feeling you’ve got your procedures tidy and your qualifying simulations consistent, Melbourne will present different conditions and a different track profile. That’s not just a setup shift; it’s a new energy problem to solve. Komatsu described the opening phase as a “steep, steep learning curve”, and it’s easy to see why. With limited energy to recover, any circuit-specific misjudgement is amplified.
Then there’s the political reality he didn’t shy away from: 2026 won’t be a level playing field, at least not in the sense some fans like to imagine when a rules reset arrives. The manufacturers will understand their own systems more deeply than the customer teams running them, and that knowledge advantage will show up in how quickly they converge on robust, repeatable deployment and harvesting strategies.
Komatsu referenced Mercedes’ preparedness at the start of the hybrid era in 2014 as a reminder of what “doing your homework” can look like, and said Barcelona’s opening day already hinted at who had arrived with a thicker playbook. Ferrari, he noted, has also been developing strongly — and Haas, as a Ferrari customer, is leaning heavily on collaboration, particularly around energy management.
That cooperation matters, but Komatsu didn’t pretend it erases the gap. Factory teams, bigger organisations, and those with relevant experience – he even referenced Formula E programmes as an example – will have an edge. Haas isn’t complaining, he insisted, but he’s not pretending the game is fair either.
If Komatsu is right, the early races of 2026 might be defined less by spectacular new-car quirks and more by something subtler: who can repeat the same lap, the same way, with the same energy profile, under pressure. In a world where you can lose seven-tenths without “making a mistake” in the traditional sense, the next performance differentiator may be the one fans don’t always see — until suddenly they do.
