Master a niche, then listen to experts: How Haas F1’s Ayao Komatsu rose to the top job

[SINGAPORE] Ayao Komatsu did not attend business school to learn how to run a Formula 1 (F1) team. Instead, nearly three years into his tenure as the chief of Haas F1, he continues to rely on the ultimate real-world classroom of high-performance sport.

The son of a political dissident who at one point wanted to become an investigative journalist, the Japanese motorsport executive has engineered his path to team principal of an F1 team after starting as a race engineer in 2003.

Now 50 years old, he credits his technical specialisation – he holds undergraduate and doctoral degrees in engineering – with helping him become a team boss.

Despite his deep technical knowledge, Komatsu believes his primary role these days is to take a step back. Because he no longer takes care of the daily tasks, he relies on his staff to identify their own roadblocks.

“You guys need to tell me what is hampering (you) to do your jobs to the best of your ability. What is stopping you?” he said of his approach to management. 

“If you don’t tell me, I don’t know, because I’m not doing it (directly),” he tells The Business Times in an interview on Thursday (Oct 8), ahead of the weekend’s F1 Grand Prix in Singapore.

Knowing when to step back and knowing how to identify the right experts to trust requires a finely tuned radar for true competence. Yet, Komatsu said he did not develop this radar by broadening his skill set, but by doing the exact opposite.

The paradox of expertise

While the corporate leadership playbook might lend itself to generalists – a 10-year Harvard Business Review study of 17,000 C-Suite executives in 2018 found that 90 per cent came into the role with generalist experience – Komatsu recommends becoming a narrow expert instead.

“For me, it’s very important when you are young, you... have to have an area where you are the expert,” he said, adding that his early years spent mastering the highly specific role of a tyre engineer gave him a framework to evaluate others. 

“That experience... meant that when I was talking with other experts... I could ask the right questions, I could understand who was really telling the truth and who’s not.”

This skill extends beyond engineering – his area of expertise – and includes anything from human resources (HR) to legal and IT. In his view, mastering a single discipline at a younger age trains the brain to identify true competence in any field, which has given him the confidence to delegate without micromanaging.

“We had good people in comms, good people in HR, good people in legal. They are the experts,” Komatsu said, recalling his early days as team principal. “Give them clear objectives on where the team is going (and) how we want to do things, but when it comes to execution, they are the experts.”

Sliding scales versus step changes

His F1 career as a tyre engineer began at British American Racing; he was next a performance engineer at Renault (which became Lotus), and then its chief race engineer. He continued in that role at Haas and was the team’s director of engineering until 2024, when he was promoted to team principal.

Komatsu, however, noted that his foray into management began much earlier.

“It’s a gradual step... a race engineer is a manager of the car crew of engineering people. So that’s the first step in management,” he said. “After that one, I became a chief race engineer... (that) for sure was a managerial function.”

As chief race engineer, he had to oversee cars, manage multiple engineers and handle people deeply involved with race weekend operations around the world.

His managerial path only deepened when he became Haas’ director of engineering. That was when he had to think beyond coding and Excel spreadsheets, and consider “how to interact with people” and how to get the best out of them.

“When I became a team principal after being a director of engineering, the (change was) not just about the management. The biggest thing for me was more on the business side,” said Komatsu. “Yes, (becoming a team principal) is a step change, but for me, it feels more like a sliding scale change.”

Cultural blends

As Komatsu scaled the management ladder, he also navigated a unique position within the F1 paddock. As a Japanese man leading an American team in a European-dominated sport, he has always encountered different work cultures and conventions.

Yet, when faced with friction or stereotypes, he has chosen not to view things through the lens of prejudice. Instead, he treats cultural misunderstandings like an engineering problem that needs a practical solution.

“When I’m faced with that... I’m not thinking about, ‘Oh, have I been discriminated against or is this racism?’” he said. “All I focus on is how to solve the situation. How can we make this work? How can we get this person to understand me? How can I change my approach so that we can work better together?”

This pragmatic approach stems from a simple, fundamental philosophy that he has learnt over three decades of living abroad – that it is much easier to change himself than to change others.

Komatsu believes it is entirely possible to break down preconceived notions without taking offence. Once a working dynamic is fixed, he might (in hindsight) occasionally recognise that some initial friction stemmed from his background – but the team would have already moved forward by then, he said.

For Komatsu, F1’s highly international environment is the perfect antidote to these issues. 

“Lots of conflicts in the world... come from ignorance,” he said. “Just being in this international environment, that must be the environment that reduces that kind of ignorance. I hate ignorance.”

Ultimately, his playbook is not a static document, but one that is constantly updated by the people he manages and the dynamic problems he solves. He flatly rejected the idea of needing formal executive education, preferring the high-stakes pressure cooker of the F1 paddock. 

“This is the best school. This is reality. This is real life,” he said. “Every day tells me if I’m doing it right or wrong. Every day is a learning curve.”