Haas didn’t hire Esteban Ocon for a bedding-in year.
When Nico Hülkenberg departed for Sauber ahead of 2025, bringing in a proven grand prix winner felt like a statement from a team that’s spent too long living week-to-week on opportunity. Ocon arrived with 10 seasons of F1 experience, a win on the CV and enough podiums to underline he isn’t just “solid”. The expectation internally was that he’d immediately give Haas a reliable reference point — and, bluntly, put clear daylight between himself and a rookie team-mate.
That didn’t really happen. Oliver Bearman, impressive as advertised, edged Ocon over the season by three points. In isolation that’s not catastrophic, but context matters: Haas needed Ocon to be the experienced hand who stabilises the operation, particularly on the Saturdays when midfield margins are brutally small. Instead, 2025 became a year where Ocon’s pace swung too violently from session to session, and too often Haas looked like it was chasing its own tail trying to pin down why.
Team principal Ayao Komatsu has been unusually candid about it. “If you look at purely the sporting result… nobody’s satisfied with Esteban’s sporting result last year,” he admitted, before getting to the heart of what made it sting. Ocon wasn’t being compared to a peer in their prime — he was being measured against a rookie, albeit “an amazing rookie”, as Komatsu put it. The mismatch between Ocon’s pedigree and the final scoreboard is what Haas “expected more” from.
Komatsu’s message, though, wasn’t to hang it all around Ocon’s neck. He framed 2025 as a 50/50 failure: the driver didn’t always extract what was there, and the team didn’t consistently give him a car that suited his needs, particularly in qualifying trim. That’s the line that should interest anyone watching Haas in 2026, because it hints at something deeper than “driver underperformed”.
If your car is only fast in a narrow operating window, the driver’s confidence tends to be the first casualty — and once that’s gone, the feedback loop between driver and engineers can become frantic. Komatsu pointed to Baku as the kind of weekend that spiralled: Ocon unhappy with braking performance, qualifying pace falling away badly, Bearman simultaneously landing on one of his strongest tracks. Haas didn’t just have an issue, it had two opposing realities in the same garage, and it didn’t resolve the mismatch quickly enough.
Komatsu’s most telling example actually came from Abu Dhabi, where Ocon looked lost on Friday — around four tenths down on Bearman — then snapped back into shape by Saturday. That’s not a driver “forgetting how to drive”; it’s a weekend where small set-up or hardware sensitivities can trigger what Komatsu called a “snowball effect”. When you’re on top of it, you arrest the slide early. When you’re not, you spend the rest of the weekend trying to reverse-engineer where it went wrong.
Haas didn’t do that “very well last year,” in Komatsu’s own words. And that’s the subtext to all of this: 2026, with its clean-sheet regulations, is not the season to be learning how to work together. The midfield will be decided by development speed and clarity of direction as much as outright concept. A team like Haas can’t afford to spend three race weekends arguing with itself over what the car is trying to say.
That’s why Komatsu is leaning so heavily on what he describes as a productive winter reset with Ocon. He says the pair have had a “very good ongoing talk” through the off-season, nailing down what the team expects and what Ocon requires in return. Crucially, Haas believes it went into the Barcelona shakedown with those uncertainties cleared, and Komatsu was emphatic that Ocon’s approach there was “absolutely faultless”.
There’s a pragmatic edge to Haas’ optimism. Komatsu stressed how valuable it is, entering a new regulation era, that Ocon and Bearman are reporting similar things from the cockpit. If your drivers want the car to behave in opposite ways, you can burn through a small team’s resources chasing both — and in the 2026 cost-cap world, inefficiency is performance.
Komatsu even extended that alignment beyond pure handling feel, referencing agreement on power unit software preferences and “simple things” like steering wheel display requirements. It sounds mundane, but in a team that can’t throw bodies at problems, that sort of harmony matters. It keeps the engineering group moving in one direction, rather than splitting effort to keep two drivers happy in two different ways.
There’s also a subtle point about culture. Komatsu suggested Ocon now better understands “who we are” as a team — the size, the limits, the need to prioritise. That’s not a criticism so much as a reality check. Drivers arriving with top-team expectations sometimes need time to adjust to how quickly — or slowly — smaller organisations can turn requests into parts and updates. The best relationships in the midfield are the ones where a driver pushes hard but also pushes smart, knowing which battles are worth fighting.
For Ocon, it’s hard to escape the sense that 2026 is a hinge year. He doesn’t need to become someone else; he needs to be the version of himself Haas thought it signed — the one who can take a messy Friday and drag it into shape by qualifying, the one who provides direction instead of adding noise. Komatsu is right about one thing: the potential is obvious. The problem in 2025 was access to it, and how often it went missing.
Haas is keeping the same line-up into the new rules, and Komatsu didn’t disguise why the stakes have risen. “We really need two drivers this year,” he said, before adding: “We need more this year.”
That reads less like pressure for pressure’s sake and more like an honest assessment of how 2026 will punish any team that turns up with one hand tied behind its back. If Haas gets Ocon firing, it doesn’t just gain points — it gains a development compass. And in a brand-new era, that might be worth even more than the points.
