Komatsu says 2026 F1 cars won't fix Monaco

Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu says Formula 1's 2026 cars will not solve Monaco's overtaking problem and believes the sport should stop trying to remake the Grand Prix's Sunday race into something it has never really been.

Speaking on the Essential F1 podcast, Komatsu said he does not expect the new rules to change the basic limitation of racing around the streets of Monte Carlo. "I don't think you can overtake on Sunday now. I mean, look at Suzuka, even Miami was quite difficult to overtake," he said. "So Monaco, I think it will be the same. I don't think it's enough now to see overtaking at Monaco."

That leaves Komatsu taking a different position from the long-running push to make Monaco less processional. Rather than searching for a rules fix, he argued F1 should accept the race's character. "We have 22 events on the calendar [this year], I think Monaco is very, very unique," he said. "I think rather than trying to make Monaco Sunday work, this is my personal opinion, I think we should just accept Monaco Sunday is that."

His view comes after several years of debate over whether Monaco needs to be reshaped to produce more action on race day. One recent attempt to add unpredictability was a 2025 experiment with two mandatory pit stops, but that was dropped again for 2026 after it did not deliver the intended result.

Komatsu's argument is that Monaco's appeal sits somewhere else entirely. He called it "an amazing location" with a "totally different vibe" and said "it's all about Saturday," a reflection of how qualifying usually carries more weight there than at any other circuit.

He also pointed to strategy as the real source of Sunday tension. Monaco is traditionally a one-stop race, and that compresses the decisive moment into a single narrow window. "The only thing that can happen is around that one stop, so that's actually pressure as well," Komatsu said. "If you make one small mistake around that, that's it, you're done, you can never recover."

For Komatsu, that is not a flaw the 2026 regulations are likely to erase but the defining competitive reality of Monaco itself.