How James Hinchcliffe stacked up against Romain Grosjean in special Haas F1 test
James Hinchcliffe at Haas' Mugello test in 2025.
Haas recently carried out a test at Mugello with James Hinchcliffe and Romain Grosjean, marking the long-time Haas driver’s return to an F1 cockpit, five years on from his infamous Bahrain crash.
Haas handed over its VF-23 for a TPC outing with former IndyCar racer turned F1 broadcaster James Hinchcliffe climbing behind the wheel, as did former Haas F1 racer Romain Grosjean.
Ayao Komatsu: Mugello outing with Hinchcliffe and Grosjean was ‘really uplifting’
Haas has embarked on an extensive testing of previous cars (TPC) programme this year, now having the facilities and resources to do so following the commencement of a technical partnership with Toyota Gazoo Racing.
Recent outings have seen former F1 driver and long-time TGR driver Kamui Kobayashi get back behind the wheel of an F1 car for the first time in a decade, while Haas also held a family-friendly event at Fuji in which Sho Tsuboi and Ryo Kirakawa were set loose in the VF-23.
The most recent outing saw Haas head to Mugello in Italy, where the team handed an F1 cockpit return to Romain Grosjean.
Now an established racer in the United States, Grosjean’s long F1 career ended at Haas in 2020 when he was involved in a terrifying fireball crash in Bahrain. He had been left without a seat for 2021 regardless, but the crash left him with minor burn injuries that ended his season prematurely.
While there has long been talk about a potential Mercedes test, Grosjean was reunited with his former team for a memorable morning’s running.
After Grosjean’s running, Canadian racing driver James Hinchcliffe got behind the wheel. An experienced former IndyCar race winner, Hinchcliffe had never driven an F1 car before.
Speaking about the event at Mugello, Haas F1 team boss Ayao Komatsu didn’t disguise just how enjoyable he had found the day.
“The whole thing was a highlight!” he told the media in Singapore.
“It was really great. Obviously, nobody wanted Bahrain to be [Romain’s] last time in an F1 car. We always wanted to do this, but until this year, we had no opportunity, no capabilities to do it.
“So, this year, we got the heritage team to run a TPC car, so as soon as we had that capability, I spoke with Romain about whether he wanted to do it.
“Of course, he wanted to do it, and he wanted to do it at a proper high-speed circuit. Mugello is one of my favourites, and one of his favourites.
“So we managed to make it happen, which was great. It was raining all day, so that was a shame. But Romain was just enjoying himself, smiling all day.
“I think Dom, the chief engineer on the heritage team, and I were a bit more stressed about ‘Come on, when’s this rain gonna clear? Can we give him a dry tyre run?’
“But Romain was just smiling at all this. I said to Dom, ‘Look, we shouldn’t be the ones stressing about it. It’s his day. He’s happy. So we should just chill out.’
“It was great, really, really good. We managed to get some of his original crew, the number one mechanic, the composite guy, and I was doing the engineer, talking to him on the radio!
“Dom used to be Roman’s performance engineer, so he was doing performance as well. It was a really, really nice experience. It was nice to be able to do that and show that we care, you know?
“Not that we planned it, but that day, Friday, we made it a family day for our Italian colleagues based in Maranello, which is about an hour and a half away. Without having that test car, it was not possible to do a family day in Italy with a car. So that’s the first time we managed to do that in 10 years, right?
“We had families and kids and everybody, close to 500 people, and that was amazing.
“The day before, we had had mule car testing, so both of our race drivers were there; they stayed overnight, so we had Romain and two of our race drivers. The whole thing was really uplifting. That’s what I feel like sometimes you need to bring the team together, it showcases who we are, we care about people, it was very nice.”
When asked how Hinchcliffe had stacked up in an F1 car, Komatsu said the Canadian had done a good job.
“The thing is, we’ve got nothing to compare against,” he said.
“It was very tricky conditions when he got in the car. He did it well and then finally, I think, he had one run with slick tyres, and he really enjoyed it.
“So I think it was really nice for somebody like him to actually get in our car to understand exactly what the current generation Formula 1 car feels like.”
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Hinchcliffe himself said after the test that he had been “left speechless” by the performance of the VF-23.
“First day in a Formula 1 car, done,” he said.
“It started out wet. Grosjean was in the car first, and he got a lot of laps done then and gave me a little bit of advice, as did Esteban, before I jumped in similar conditions.
“Then, luckily, the rain stopped and the sun came out, and for the very last run of the day I was able to bolt on some slicks and get a sense of what this thing can do in dry conditions.
“Kind of speechless, honestly, at the end of the day—which is saying something for a guy that talks for a living. [It was] an incredible experience, an incredible machine. Can’t thank everybody at Haas enough. And it’s a day I’m going to remember for a long time.
“Hopefully, I’ll find a way to get to do this again sometime, because I really enjoyed it and would love to do it again. But again, can’t thank everybody on the team enough.”
Haas’ ability to carry out such tests has great benefits for the team by way of training up personnel as well as offering practice opportunities in a non-racing environment, while also offering small commercial benefits as Komatsu confirmed the programme is paying for itself.
“At the moment, yes, we’re certainly not doing that to make a loss, but it’s very nice now to be able to do that,” he said.
“What I felt at Mugello was that we’ve got a really good mixture of experienced guys and young guys. I felt that we are growing people’s right culture.
“You can’t put a sort of monetary value on that. But I think that’s the best thing, to train and bring the younger generations with the right culture. That’s much easier said than done, but that’s happening, so I’m really happy about that.”
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