The F1 team principal who wanted to be a journalist

Alessandro Bravi, Christian Horner and Ayao Komatsu in 2024 — Photo: © IMAGO

F1 News

The F1 team principal who wanted to be a journalist

One F1 boss had a very different career in mind

Sheona Mountford F1 Journalist

Motorsport journalist working in F1 since 2024.

Monday 6 April 2026 11:55

F1 wasn't always on one team principal's agenda as they recently revealed their surprise career choice.

Increasingly, F1 team principals come from an engineering background with the likes of Laurent Mekies, Andrea Stella and Mattia Binotto all utilising their technical expertise in their team leadership.

Haas boss Ayao Komatsu is also one such team principal, having started his F1 career at BAR in 2003 as a tyre engineer. He then spent nearly a decade at Renault/Lotus where he rose to the role of race engineer, eventually working with Romain Grosjean.

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He followed the Frenchman to Haas in 2016, where he became their trackside engineering director and was eventually appointed to the role of team principal following the exit of Guenther Steiner in 2024.

Despite an illustrious career in motorsport, Formula 1 wasn't Komatsu's only career interest and he recently revealed a different side of him during an interview.

Komatsu: I wanted to get to the truth

Speaking to The Independent, Komatsu explained: "I actually wanted to be an investigative journalist. I wanted to do journalism that the police and the media wouldn’t touch. My own investigations, my own evidence, to get to the truth."

As with so many others who have gone on to work in the highest levels of F1, Komatsu then revealed how his obsession with the sport changed everything and just how hard he had to work to get there.

"But Formula 1 then became everything. A friend told me I had to do maths and physics and I thought ‘Oh s***.’ I wasn’t a scientific guy. I looked at engineers and wished I had their brains. But it didn’t matter how much time I needed to do in the classroom… I was going to make it to Formula 1."

"When I told my dad I wanted to work in Formula 1, he didn’t even have a driving licence. Motorsport and cars were not in our life. But I’m grateful to my parents for letting me pursue what I wanted to do and they let me go."

Komatsu moved from Tokyo to the UK in 1995 to study at Loughborough University, and said of the move: "At university, I just loved the new environment. Tokyo is an international city, but is still a very conservative society.

"I loved the melting pot of Loughborough, with so many different cultures. Rugby was so important for my integration into life in the UK."

F1 Haas Ayao Komatsu