Haas will tick off another of its 2026 rookie-running obligations in Austria, with reserve driver Ryo Hirakawa set to take Esteban Ocon’s car for Friday’s first practice session at the Red Bull Ring.
It’s a straightforward change on paper — one hour, one car, one session — but it also says plenty about where Haas finds itself at this point in the season. The team has started 2026 with a sense of momentum and, crucially, a points cushion that gives it the freedom to use FP1 for development and evaluation rather than pure survival. With 21 points scored across the opening seven races, Haas is operating with a bit of breathing room by its recent standards.
Hirakawa’s presence is no surprise. He’s been Haas’s reserve since last year, a role that’s taken on extra weight since the squad’s technical partnership with Toyota was put in place in late 2024. In modern F1, reserve drivers are increasingly part of the wider programme rather than the “just-in-case” understudy, and Hirakawa’s schedule reflects that. He already has a track record of being dropped into official sessions — he ran in FP1 for McLaren and Alpine previously and logged four FP1 outings for Haas last season, taking the wheel in Bahrain, Spain, Mexico and Abu Dhabi.
This weekend marks his first FP1 appearance of the 2026 campaign, and it also helps Haas satisfy the regulations that require teams to run a rookie driver — defined as someone with no more than two grand prix starts — four times over the year, split across both cars. It’s an obligation, but it can be a useful one if the team treats it as a genuine data-gathering exercise rather than a box-ticking exercise.
Hirakawa arrives in Austria with fresh high-profile mileage elsewhere too, having just finished third for Toyota at the Le Mans 24 Hours. It’s a race he won in 2022, and this year’s edition carried extra significance for Toyota as the sister car took victory to end Ferrari’s recent run of dominance at Le Mans — that winning entry featuring former F1 drivers Nyck de Vries and Kamui Kobayashi alongside Mike Conway. None of that directly translates to the Red Bull Ring, of course, but it does underline the level of expectation around Toyota-linked talent right now, and why Haas is keen to keep Hirakawa involved in meaningful F1 running.
There’s also an increasingly open reality around how FP1 seats are valued in the market. It emerged last year, during the legal case involving McLaren and former reserve driver Alex Palou, that Hirakawa paid McLaren $3.5m to drive in FP1 at the 2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. That fee also covered two TPC outings in an older McLaren car to prepare him for the session. The Palou case ultimately ended with McLaren being awarded more than $12m in damages — and while Hirakawa’s Haas outing in Austria sits in a different context, it’s a reminder that Friday practice has become a currency of its own in the paddock.
For Ocon, the immediate impact is minimal: he loses an hour on a track where teams tend to find a rhythm quickly anyway. But it does come at a moment when his half of the Haas garage could do with a clean, uneventful weekend. Through seven races, rookie team-mate Oliver Bearman has scored 18 of Haas’s 21 points, leaving Ocon on three. It’s not panic stations — not least because the car has been competitive enough to keep them in the midfield mix — but it is the kind of split that inevitably draws attention, especially when one side of the garage is building results and the other is still searching for momentum.
The wider backdrop is that Haas has already had to waste energy batting away noise. After Miami, rumours swirled suggesting a falling-out between Ocon and team principal Ayao Komatsu. Both moved quickly to shut it down, and Komatsu was particularly scathing about the reporting when asked at the following round in Canada, insisting there was “no foundation whatsoever” and describing it as “bulls**t gossip”.
That outburst did two things in the paddock. First, it emphatically drew a line under the story. Second, it served as a reminder that Haas — now more stable, more competitive and more visible — doesn’t intend to play the passive role it often did when it was fighting at the back. When the team feels it’s being dragged into manufactured drama, it’s going to push back.
So Hirakawa in FP1 is not a signal of crisis, nor is it a commentary on Ocon’s future. It’s a team using its available tools: meeting the rookie quota, strengthening ties with a major partner, and gathering extra feedback in a season where the margins are tight and the midfield is still defined by who brings the best updates and executes cleanest weekends.
For Hirakawa, it’s a chance to put another credible F1 session on his CV at a time when Friday running is more scrutinised than ever. For Haas, it’s a low-risk way of extracting value from a required session — and for Ocon, it’s simply one less hour to get his eye in before the weekend properly starts.
