BAR sign cooperation with HAAS

Lucky Strike B•A•R Honda announces today that it has signed the UK division of Haas Automation, an American machine tool manufacturer, as an official supplier to the team.

In its twentieth year of business, Haas is now the largest machine tool builder in the United States, and employs almost 1,000 people in its 820,000 square-foot facility in California, the most modern machine tool manufacturing operation in America. Haas manufactures four major product lines: vertical machining centres, horizontal machining centres, CNC lathes and rotary tables.

Haas Automation will supply B•A•R with two high-speed CNC machining centres, which will be operational in the team’s on-site machine shop.

Geoffrey Willis, B•A•R Technical Director, commented: “B•A•R’s partnership with Haas Automation means we will be increasing our on-site manufacturing capabilities by around 25 per cent. The extra machines will reduce our downtime and increase our rate of development, which in turn will lead to performance gain.”

Andrew Stevens, Managing Director of Haas Automation in the UK, said, “We are delighted to establish a partnership with B•A•R. The technically demanding and competitive environment of Formula One is a perfect arena for Haas Automation to demonstrate the high performance characteristics of their CNC machine tools - speed, accuracy and reliability are all requisite components of a high-quality machine tool, and each is used to the full in the machining of components for a Formula One car.”

The Haas Automation tag is already synonymous with racing in the USA. The company formed technical partnerships with a number of American motorsport teams from 1995 onwards, and in 2002 Haas CNC Racing was launched, with the announcement that it would compete in the Winston Cup Series. The Haas CNC Racing Team is based in its own 40,000 square-foot building in North Carolina.