James Hinchcliffe is laughing about it, but the timing is suspicious.
Weeks after the six-time IndyCar winner climbed into a Haas for a Testing of Previous Cars day at Mugello, the American team has found another gear. Oliver Bearman ripped to a career-best fourth in Mexico City, flirted with a podium, and only a one-stop, soft-tyre masterclass from Max Verstappen kept Haas off the rostrum. Cue the jokes.
“I may have, you know, sorted some things out on the car,” Hinchcliffe deadpanned on the F1 Nation podcast, after host Tom Clarkson and Mercedes ambassador Esteban Gutiérrez teased him as Haas’s new lucky charm. “It’s no big deal.”
Behind the banter there’s a useful storyline for Haas. The team’s TPC programme—run through its Toyota Gazoo Racing alliance—put Hinchcliffe in the VF-23 at Mugello last month, sharing the day with Romain Grosjean for the Frenchman’s long-overdue farewell run in an F1 car. While the current VF-25 has been sharpened by steady upgrades and cleaner execution, Hinchcliffe’s debrief reads like a racer who got a vivid reminder of what modern F1 machinery can do.
“Unbelievable,” he said of the Mugello outing. “It started in the wet—track I’d never driven, car I’d never driven in the wet—but it dried out at the end of the day. It exceeded expectations.”
Hinchcliffe knew the braking would be savage and the high-speed grip borderline absurd. What blindsided him was the car’s balance when you pile multiple forces on at once.
“The one that blew me away… combined traction,” he explained. “How early, mid-corner, still fully loaded, you could just start feeding in the throttle. Rear didn’t step out. It didn’t squat down and make the front understeer. I was clearly way below the limit because it was just doing everything you wanted it to do and then some.”
Ayao Komatsu liked what he saw, even if the conditions made benchmarking tricky. “It was very tricky when he got in the car,” the Haas team principal said. “He did it well and then finally had one run with slick tyres, and he really enjoyed it. 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.”
That kind of first-hand understanding also explains why Hinchcliffe’s insight on the pod carried weight. He’s done enough miles in serious machinery to separate TV glamour from what a driver actually feels when the Pirellis bite.
Haas will take the optics too. In a season where margins in the midfield are razor-thin, Mexico was a statement weekend for a group that’s quietly tidied up its race craft. Bearman’s P4 finish was no fluke—measured tyre management, clear communication, and a car that looked forgiving when the altitude and bumps typically expose the impatient. A podium was on until Verstappen made a soft compound last longer than most dared, grabbed the final spot, and left Haas with the kind of fourth place that stings for about 30 seconds before it lands as motivation.
The numbers matter now. With four rounds to go, Haas sits eighth in the Constructors’ Championship and can still see sixth on the horizon, with Racing Bulls only a handful of points up the road. That’s not something anyone would’ve bet the house on before the summer.
So did Hinchcliffe sprinkle Ferrari-sourced holy water into the VF-23 at Mugello? Probably not. But drivers of his calibre don’t waste days like that—they find feel, they refine language, they help teams calibrate what the car is doing versus what the driver thinks it is. And if a little fresh energy followed him into the garage, all the better.
“[He] brought the magic to the team,” Gutiérrez joked on the podcast. On current form, Haas won’t argue.
Whether it was a lucky charm, a productive TPC, or simply a team hitting its stride at the right moment, the upshot is the same: Haas has momentum, a confident rookie in Bearman, and a car that’s beginning to look like it belongs in the thick of the fight. If you’re counting, that’s three reasons nobody at Kannapolis wants the season to end just yet.
