Ayao Komatsu has never been the sort to hide behind PR varnish, and in Montreal he didn’t suddenly start.
The Haas team principal went straight through the rumour mill that’s been churning since Miami, dismissing suggestions of a fallout with Esteban Ocon as “absolute bulls**t” and questioning what he sees as a growing cottage industry of fabrication that feeds off mistranslation and clicks rather than paddock reality.
“I don’t know where that story came from, no idea,” Komatsu said during his Canadian Grand Prix weekend media session. “This Brazilian journalist was quoted, but I have no idea. No foundation whatsoever, absolute bulls**t.
“If somebody wants to write that kind of bulls**t, feel free, but f**king hell, is that journalism?”
The noise began with claims on social media aggregator sites that Komatsu had lost patience with Ocon’s slow start to the season and that the pair had clashed during the Miami weekend — a story that grew arms and legs quickly enough that it even morphed into speculation about whether Ocon would see out the year with the team.
Komatsu’s irritation wasn’t just about his own name being dragged into it; he was clearly exasperated that the story gathered momentum simply because it was repeated. At one point he challenged the room directly: had anyone actually heard him say anything remotely resembling what was being attributed to him?
He didn’t stop there. Komatsu described how the whole episode had escalated to the point where Ocon’s management felt compelled to contact Haas to make sure there wasn’t a real problem hiding behind the gossip. That’s the part teams hate: not the online shouting itself, but the way it can force unnecessary internal check-ins, put people on edge, and waste time when you’re trying to focus on performance.
“Esteban gets worried, his manager gets worried,” Komatsu said. “Esteban knows that we haven’t had any argument in Miami… This morning, we were smiling and talking about it. ‘What the f**k is that about?’”
Komatsu said he and Ocon had already laughed it off when they met in Montreal, but he wanted to “completely clarify this to everyone” because, in his view, leaving it to fester only encourages the next made-up storyline.
A striking element in Komatsu’s version of events is how easily he believes the misinformation snowballed via translation — a detail that matters in a global championship where quotes bounce between languages and platforms in minutes. He admitted he hadn’t even seen what the Brazilian journalist originally wrote, but suggested that once the game of telephone begins, it’s hard to control what ends up being presented as fact.
“And then I think it gets written in Japanese,” he said. “I haven’t actually read what this Brazilian journalist wrote, so, in Japanese translation, how inaccurate is it? I have no idea.”
Komatsu broadened his criticism to other pieces of speculative chatter he says have similarly “got zero foundation”, pointing to recurring claims on Japanese sites that Haas is interested in Red Bull reserve Yuki Tsunoda — and his frustration that stories can then be recycled internationally, dressed up as something more concrete than they ever were.
“Lots of Japanese sites, they really want to create s**t, like I’d like to take Yuki or something. That’s got zero foundation,” he said, before noting how the same rumour can be picked up elsewhere for traction. “If you write a story, you check your sources, don’t you?”
It’s not often an F1 team principal goes after the broader media ecosystem with this level of heat, but Komatsu was candid about why it hits a nerve. He revealed he once wanted to be an investigative journalist, and the idea that something so easily disproven can circulate at scale clearly bothers him on principle as much as in practice.
“When I read things like this, it’s like ‘f**king hell, are you not embarrassed about what you’re writing?’” he said. “By writing bulls**t like this with no foundation, you lose credibility completely.”
Ocon, for his part, had already pushed back earlier on Thursday, also labelling the claims “bulls**t” and warning about the speed with which reputations can be damaged when stories spread unchecked.
“It’s disappointing to see that you can make such damage to a driver’s reputation in two or three days, while you know there’s nothing founded,” Ocon said. “These people would just get away with no issues; they just fabricate stories… It became so big that obviously you can’t just notice it.”
For Haas, the practical takeaway is simple: whatever their on-track issues may or may not be, Komatsu is adamant there’s no civil war brewing in the garage. And for everyone else, it’s another reminder that in 2026’s F1 media landscape, a baseless idea can become “a story” purely through repetition — until someone inside the paddock decides they’ve had enough and lights it up in public.
