As it enters the 2025 Formula 1 season, the Haas team has achieved a milestone moment regarding its budget and overall funding sources.
Team principal Ayao Komatsu said in a recent roundtable interview attended by Motorsport.com that squad owner Gene Haas for the “first time…doesn’t have to put his money in – it’s great.”
While a noteworthy statement alone, a certain amount of ambiguity remained in Komatsu’s typical forthright words.
After all, the team exists as a marketing exercise for Haas Automation – so obviously it uses much of Gene Haas’s money to form its budget every year and 2025 is no exception.
But Motorsport.com understands that for the first time in the team’s history, Haas has not entered the year facing a funding loss. Previously, when his squad needed extra funds, Gene Haas has provided the top up required from his personal funds.
There are two major elements behind Haas’s positive budget situation for 2025. The first is the approximate $30m prize money gain it made by going from finishing 10th in the 2023 constructors’ standings to ending up seventh last year.
The team was favourite to net a further $10m gain with the sixth place it held for much of the latter part of 2024, but it was pipped by Alpine late in the campaign following the Enstone team’s major points haul with its double podium result in Brazil.
The second important financial gain for Haas in terms of its 2025 budget concerns its sponsorship income this time around. With Toyota now adding funds along with Haas Automation and existing title sponsor MoneyGram, Haas is also for the first time now understood to be operating at F1’s budget cap limit.
However, Haas’s limit is around $15m lower than the $135 million level for its opposition, given its unique approach to car production in outsourcing much of its design process and parts supply to Ferrari and Dallara respectively.
But the American squad still has by far the lowest staffing headcount overall of any of the 10 teams.
Even with its current hiring spree its total is still just 330 – well down on the approximate 1,000 employees at bigger teams such as Ferrari and Mercedes.
That Haas is now operating at the cap limit suggests its model of outsourcing so much of its development to outside companies is its main outgoing, with limited room for finding savings or efficiencies.
As well as sponsorship cash being a part of the technical partner alliance arrangement with Toyota that was announced last October, which means the manufacturer’s logos and branding featured prominently on 2024’s VF-24 and will likely do so again this year with the VF-25, Toyota is also providing considerable other resources to Haas.
These will allow Haas to run its first Testing of Previous Cars programme and also build a new simulator at its Banbury base.
Motorsport.com understands that most of the TPC funding comes from within Haas’s now upped budget cap spending, along with the operation of the simulator once it is built.
The construction of that facility, however, falls under the separate Capex limit all teams must abide by.
Gene Haas is being presented with a choice of plans to either expand Haas’s current cramped Banbury facility – where construction of the new simulator has not yet started – or move to a new site entirely.
When asked by Motorsport.com what feedback he had given after his first season as team principal following predecessor Guenther Steiner’s axing, Komatsu replied: “Gene was very happy at the end of last season. Honestly, I thought he would be unhappy that we couldn’t get P6 but before I realised, my phone was ringing.
“We finished the [Abu Dhabi 2024 finale], I said thank you to the guys, and by the time I had walked out of the garage, I already had a message from Gene congratulating us.
“That was pleasant – not surprising but it was nice to hear. I called him and he straightaway said ‘many congratulations – it’s such an amazing achievement’, which honestly you don’t get often from Gene.
“I was pleasantly surprised and grateful for his comments. Of course, he is very competitive and wants more, of course. He’s always setting me an ambitious target and my job is really trying to hit a realistic target. But he is really excited.”
