Haas has held what amounts to the last of the 2021 Formula 1 car launches by officially unveiling its VF-21 in the Bahrain pitlane ahead of pre-season testing.
The team’s main launch event had been the online reveal of its new Russian-based livery last Friday, but it used renders of its 2020 car for that purpose.
It then released a short video of the VF-21 making its track debut in a shakedown run at Sakhir on Thursday before fully revealing the car on Friday morning.
Haas has made it very clear that it regards 2021 as a “transition” season while it puts all its resources into getting ready for the huge technical rule changes of 2022.
It opted not to use the development tokens system to make changes to its carryover car during the winter, feeling that would be a waste of its resources in the circumstances, and it will not develop the VF-21 at all during the season.
But the car is not identical to the version that had a muted run to ninth in the 2020 constructors’ championship.
It has been adapted to carry the upgraded Ferrari power unit, and the team has now produced and added the developments that had been scheduled to appear during 2020 before Haas opted against upgrading the car in-season as it conserved resources amid the financial uncertainty caused by the pandemic.
Consequently the VF-20 “wasn’t really a finished project”, according to Haas’s chief aerodynamicist.
He added: “We were kind of 60 or 70% of the way through it when we had to commit to producing that car for the first test of 2020 thinking that we would be having a development programme that would get it to the standard that we demanded.
“But we weren’t able to complete that process because of what then happened with COVID and the team as a consequence.”
That work at least has now been completed for the VF-21.
Haas’s financial situation also prompted a total change of driver line-up for 2021, with the experienced Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen released in favour of Formula 2 graduates Mick Schumacher and Nikita Mazepin.
F2 champion Schumacher is a protege of Haas’s technical partner Ferrari, while Mazepin has family ties with Haas’s new title sponsor Uralkali.
