Oliver Bearman didn’t need a stopwatch to sound upbeat in Barcelona. What had him grinning in the Haas garage after the opening running of 2026 wasn’t so much a headline lap time as the kind of quiet currency engineers actually trust this early: uninterrupted mileage.
In the first proper shakedown of a new regulation era, Haas has emerged as one of the teams that simply looks ready. By the end of the second day at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, only Red Bull had logged more laps, and Haas’ total included a session where it racked up almost three race distances. In a winter where new cars, new procedures and fresh power unit complexity are supposed to trip teams up, that’s a pretty loud statement from a squad that’s often had to spend February firefighting.
“To be at the shakedown and to be at this test and do a whole day, we completed more than two race distances, closer to three, actually, with no major issues, it’s super, super impressive for our team,” Bearman said. “Everybody should be really proud of that achievement.”
Bearman’s enthusiasm had the edge of someone who knows what this phase is normally like: start-stop runs, garage thrashes, and test plans being binned before lunch. Instead, Haas has been able to treat Barcelona like what it’s meant to be — a relentless learning exercise, lap after lap, with drivers feeding back on behaviour that will define the baseline direction of the whole season.
“We’re setting our targets high. We want to continue to learn about this car,” he added. “I think every lap is a learning experience for us at this stage, but it’s good fun as well.”
That “fun” part matters. The first weeks of a regulation change can be grim for a driver if the car is inconsistent or fragile, because you never get into a rhythm long enough to build a feel for what’s real and what’s just a one-off quirk. Bearman, by contrast, is getting repetition — and repetition is how you start making meaningful calls.
It’s also how a young driver gets to leave fingerprints on a project. Bearman acknowledged that this is his first time arriving at a new-era car where what the driver says carries an outsized impact, because everyone is still deciding what “normal” looks like.
“It’s my first time being in this situation with a regulation change where, as drivers, we can have so much impact on the end result,” he said. “So it’s a great prospect.”
Haas has already used two of its three allocated days, and there has been a hiccup — but tellingly, it hasn’t derailed the programme. Bearman framed it as the sort of issue you almost welcome at this point, because it forces the team to stress-test its processes as much as its hardware.
“It’s very early stages in this cycle of regulations, and we’ve had up until now, very clean laps and very clean running,” he said. “Unfortunately, we had a small issue, but that’s what this is all about. We expect to have these issues.”
What caught his attention was how the same problem would’ve been a quick turnaround on last year’s car, but with everything new — and with the procedures around the power unit more involved than the paddock’s been used to — even minor interruptions can take longer than outsiders might assume.
“It’s more everybody is learning the car and the new bits and procedures,” Bearman explained. “So the problem would have taken maybe 30 minutes with last year’s car since everybody knew it so well, it took a lot longer just because there’s a few more intricated details, and there’s just so much more to the power unit compared to what we’ve been used to.”
That last line is the giveaway about why Haas’ early mileage is being talked about up and down the pitlane. Plenty of teams can look sharp for a handful of laps. Far fewer can string together long runs, execute their plan, and keep the car cycling through the garage without drama — especially when every department is learning a new playbook at speed.
Haas won’t be handing out trophies for winter reliability, and the paddock knows better than to etch February narratives into stone. But there’s a practical advantage to what it’s banked in Spain: when you’ve already built a mountain of clean data and the car’s basically doing what you ask of it, the final test day becomes an opportunity to be braver with experiments rather than merely trying to get to the chequered flag of the session.
And for Bearman, the benefit is simpler. He’s getting laps — the kind that let a driver push beyond first impressions and start talking in specifics, not vibes. In 2026, that’s not just useful. It’s leverage.
