Team principal Ayao Komatsu concedes the fallout from events last year, resulting in his promotion, mean the VF-24 won’t immediately blow any socks off come Bahrain testing
ALEX KALINAUCKAS
Given that McLaren had rather stolen its marketing-boosting thunder in by providing a livery-only season launch two weeks earlier, Haas has at least provided a few hints of what to expect from its real VF-24 car and its potential for the 2024 campaign. The new car will run for the first time in a Silverstone shakedown this Sunday. With Nico Hulkenberg at the wheel, Kevin Magnussen will have to wait until the upcoming Bahrain pre-season test for his first chance. The pair will eventually both be driving a car that, colour-scheme-wise in a first consideration, looks near identical to last year’s VF-23. The only real change concerns the VF-24’s nose, which is now mainly black compared to the largely white approach of last year. In the renders the American team has released, this appears to be a matte finish, but it would be logical to expect the real thing to run naked carbon fibre to save weight. There are also a few other minor livery alterations, including white flashes on the respective front and rear wing endplates.
But the renders do at least offer some clues into the developments it has made to the package with which it sort of ended 2023. Haas was the last team to switch to Red Bull’s downwash concept for upper aerodynamic surfaces, a change it made with a much-vaunted upgrade package at October’s United States Grand Prix. But, after it had become clear that the changes provided little, if any, performance boost and didn’t appear to solve the team’s tyre problems in races, Haas put Hulkenberg back on the old specification to compare his car’s aero performance with that of Magnussen at the final two events.
“In terms of physical changes, as everyone knows, when we made the upgrade in Austin that was the concept towards this year’s car,” Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu said in a lengthy statement released by his squad last Friday. “But because we had the physical limitation of the side impact structure, rad-duct arrangement, and cooling arrangement, we couldn’t do the full-blown VF-24-type concept. I knew exactly where we were going for this year, but everyone saw a preview in Austin.”
A blister seen in the floor surface of the VF-24’s initial renders reveals that Haas has been able to lower the mandated Side Impact Spars (SIS). This means the undercut of the downwash
