In a media call last week, Steiner suggested that prior to his departure, the wind tunnel numbers already suggested that the VF-24 would be competitive and that the team was "wrong" to take a low-key approach when predicting its potential form.
The car has already proved capable of making Q3 and Nico Hulkenberg and Kevin Magnussen have made the points three times between them, putting the team in seventh place in the constructors’ table.
Komatsu insists that the team couldn’t have predicted such potential as it didn’t know how much progress rivals would make.
“I knew how much we were finding,” he noted in Suzuka on Thursday. “But I’ve got to assume everybody else is finding at least the same or more because I know how late we started. I know we stopped for two months to do the Austin upgrade.
“Then we are the smallest team, right? It's not like we've got more advanced methodology. Now, I'm sure everybody else is as clever as anybody else, on average.
“So that's what my baseline is. It's not about bullshitting or putting up a smokescreen or anything. That's my expectation of reality.
“And knowing that number, I'm sorry, but it's not a big number. So, there's no way I would have thought that would be good enough for P7. No way. Then how can you expect Alpine to do what they did? Would you predict that? No.
“Then you cannot bank on somebody messing it up, you’ve got to assume they are doing a good job.”
Source: Autosport