Haas will start 2025 with a brand new driver lineup in Esteban Ocon and Ollie Bearman, but the changes in personnel have also extended to those more behind the scenes with Laura Mueller’s promotion headlining the changes.

Mueller will be Ocon’s race engineer for the new season following her promotion from the role of performance engineer, which she held for three years. But her promotion represents more than just this, as she has become the sport’s first ever full-time female race engineer.

A race engineer is the main link between the team and the driver, most commonly known for their communications with the driver over the radio during sessions, but they also play a significant role off-track in aiding the driver to extract performance as one of the most senior trackside individuals.

We’ve seen some iconic driver-race engineer pairings on the grid such as Max Verstappen and his engineer Gianpiero Lambiase or Lewis Hamilton and his Mercedes’ engineer Pete ‘Bono’ Bonnington. The communication between the driver and their engineer is often credited, by the drivers themselves and team bosses, as being key to their success on track. Christian Horner spoke to the role Lambiase has played in Verstappen’s achievements, saying “it is that relationship between driver and engineer and team that enables you to achieve these kinds of results.”

Mueller is credited by Haas’ team principal, Ayao Komatsu, as being a “pretty determined character” who has a “really, really good work ethic” – characteristics he felt suited her to this promotion and to working in this way with Ocon.

“She’s going to be Esteban’s Race Engineer. In terms of looking at it personality-wise, Esteban is a pretty determined character as well. So that side, I think the driving force, I think that personality matches pretty well.

“And then what she’s really good at is, when she sees a problem, she digs deep, and she doesn’t stop at the first answer. Some people, when they find the answer, first answer, they stop there. They think, ‘Oh, great, I found the solution, move on’.

“She has a good work ethic such that when she finds the first solution, she knows that there’s 10 things, now you’ve got new questions to answer.

“Her determination is the one that impresses me the most.”

Mueller began work at Haas in 2022 in the simulator department, but she has extensive experience of motorsport engineering over DTM, endurance and junior formulae over both the performance and race engineering sides and is a graduate of the Technical University of Munich.

Given her work ethic and “very, very clear” and calm radio communication, Komatsu had no hesitation in promoting Mueller to this role. “It’s not like I chose Laura because she’s female. You just don’t care about nationality, nor gender – that really does not matter,” he said.

“What matters is what you can offer, how you fit into the team, and how you can maximise the performance.”

Ocon won’t be alone in having a new race engineer for the 2025 season, as Ronan O’Hare has been promoted from performance engineer to race engineer for Ollie Bearman as part of these personnel changes at Haas.

Aside from the new race engineering team, Haas have hired Carine Cridelich as Head of Strategy who will join from Racing Bulls. Mark Lowe will return to the team as Sporting Director and Francesco Nenci, previous Dakar performance team leader at Audi, is joining as Chief Race Engineer.

There are also a number of internal changes to address where Komatsu noticed Haas were lacking over his first year as team principal – their race weekend execution. “It’s a huge change”, he said, “but I felt it was one of the weakest areas last year.

“The more the car became competitive, it kind of exposed it more, if you like.”

“In terms of [race] execution, we should have finished P6 [in the championship], but we didn’t. Part of it was we left too many points on the table from the trackside operation. So we really needed to step up on that one.”

This not only comes down to hiring or appointing individuals to new roles, but also a testing previous cars (TPC) programme, which plays a significant role in preparing and training trackside staff and is something Haas have lacked.

As part of their partnership with Toyota, Haas are now able to run a TPC programme from this year, which began last week in Jerez, Spain with Ocon, Bearman and Toyota driver Ritomo Miyata using their 2023 car, the VF-23. Not only does this programme allow drivers time behind the wheel, but it also allows the team to give trackside experience to the wider team.

“TPC is very important in terms of training personnel”, explained Komatsu to F1.com when the deal was announced. “We have just over 300 people, we have no contingency in personnel, so if let’s say one race engineer, one performance engineer decides to leave or has a programme not to attend a race we are really struggling, on the limit all the time, and in order to improve the organisation you cannot be in that kind of survival stage as a baseline.”

“We’ve got to build up our organisation, so through TPC we can start training our engineers, our mechanics, having back-up people there.”

It could be argued that these changes and the awareness of the impact they can have on an organisation are an influence of Komatsu’s engineering background, and while it may be a lot of change at once, Komatsu said “we had to do it at some point. We can’t keep putting it off.”

Haas will be aiming to improve on their seventh place finish in the 2024 standings this season, but this restructuring and reorganisation now is setting them up for the highly anticipated 2026 season, where they’ll hope Komatsu’s changes will come to fruition.