Haas boss Komatsu drives 35-year-old Footwork Arrows ahead of Italian GP

Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu drove a 1990 Footwork Arrows A11B ahead of the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, giving the Japanese engineer a rare taste of a car that competed in Formula 1 more than three decades before he took charge of his own team.

The A11B is an evolution of the Ross Brawn-designed A11 and was powered by a 3.5-litre naturally aspirated Ford Cosworth DFR V8. During the 1990 season it was raced by Michele Alboreto, Alex Caffi, and Bernd Schneider, with its sole points finish coming courtesy of Caffi’s fifth place at the Monaco Grand Prix that year.

Komatsu’s historic outing comes at a difficult moment for the American outfit. Haas collected points in five of the first six rounds of the 2026 season but has failed to score since, leaving it seventh in the constructors’ standings on 21 points. At Monza, drivers Ollie Bearman and Esteban Ocon showed modest pace across the three practice sessions, with Bearman going 14th, eighth, and 14th fastest and Ocon 18th, 18th, and 17th fastest respectively.

“The Italian Grand Prix is always a special one for us with our design office located in Maranello,” Komatsu said in the team’s race-weekend preview. “We take the opportunity to welcome many of our team-mates to Monza and have them experience what they are working for every day.”

Komatsu acknowledged the team needs to move on from a frustrating Dutch Grand Prix. “We’ll be arriving in Italy keen to put a frustrating weekend in Zandvoort firmly behind us,” he said. “There were positives for sure operationally, but ultimately, we were still looking to find more performance from the VF-26.”

The team is bringing a fresh upgrade package to Monza and Komatsu stressed the importance of extracting maximum value from practice time. “We showed last year that we can continue to find performance deep into the season, and that’s our continued focus,” he added.