Scott Mitchell-Malm

Haas is basically bringing itself, sort of kicking and screaming up to minimum viable product, really, in a few areas, but...

When I saw the room for myself, and JP took us into the bit where the engineering bay will be, and he just pointed to the wall and just said, and there's the only room in the whole building, and it's in the darkest room that the factory will have, basically, because there was a small little...

pretty small uh window on the on the side and you know it was um it was a light-hearted comment but i thought it and the reason i mentioned it is because there is hardly any natural light inside but they've they've got um it's not just when you get into you know like the bowels of the factory that it gets goes it all goes a bit dark it you wander around into like main offices and stuff like that there isn't a huge amount of it so i agree with what you said before uh i really think gene has and

needs to recognise the asset that he's got and actually what these people are working with.

Because I walk around there and I think, not just like, how are you running an F1 team from here, but how are you running an F1 team that's just, regardless of the logistics and what they're responsible for,

is punching so much above its weight in terms of the teams that it's managing to beat weekend to weekend, season to season.

And everything we say about the factory is not meant to be said in a derogatory way about the team itself.

And it's not meant to be snide remarks or anything like that.

It's really just trying to contextualise the reality that Haas faces because just calling it F1's smallest team doesn't do justice to...

the creativity within with which it's having to work to achieve what it's achieved so far

It's a very pertinent question.

I think the main thing at the moment is that the ceiling has been raised for what Haas can achieve or what it can do in the short term and in the longer term.

And then how much really depends on other factors.

So how invested does Toyota really want to get longer term?

But also, to come back to what we were discussing in the first part, at what point is Gene either going to put his hand in his pocket again or...

just just relinquish part of the team bring in external investment whether that's Toyota or whether that's from um somewhere else a private equity group whatever because it's not going to have any shortage of offers but there's no real indication he really wants to spend much of his own cash and if that doesn't happen you can't just raise one side of it so what Toyota can bring is um

basically an evolution of what we've seen so far in terms of personnel is maybe a basic way of saying it because that's what's facilitated the TPC program.

That's what's, you know, helping them with an installation of a simulator as well as obviously that equipment.

But there's a lot more that Toyota could do in terms of that European facility that it's got.

Could it take on more production work, more design work longer term?