Haas doubles down with Toyota: VF-26 breaks cover ahead of 2026 shake-up
Haas has rolled out its first look for the new rules era, unveiling the VF-26 with a crisp white-and-black paint job punched up by Toyota red. The American outfit enters its 11th season with a new title partner, a fresh name — TGR Haas F1 Team — and the same drivers: Esteban Ocon and Ollie Bearman.
The livery arrives via digital renders, as is now customary, and the car follows suit with the 2026 brief: smaller, lighter, and tidier in profile than its 2025 predecessor. The updated look also underlines a busier commercial roster and, most notably, the deepening of Haas’ tie-up with Toyota Gazoo Racing. What began as a technical collaboration has become a full title partnership, with TGR branding given star billing across the VF-26.
Team principal Ayao Komatsu didn’t dress up the challenge. Launching a car this early, on the back of a compressed off-season and amid wholesale regulation changes, is “surreal” in his words, but the priority is simple: get to Barcelona ready to run. Haas will skip a filming day and instead start its on-track programme at the five-day shakedown at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, where each team gets three of the five days, before two collective tests in Bahrain next month. While Audi and Cadillac have already logged their filming laps, Haas is choosing mileage where it matters.
“Track time is going to be crucial,” Komatsu said, pointing to the sheer volume of learning to be unlocked in Spain and Bahrain. It’s the same mantra up and down the pitlane when a rulebook resets — bank laps, map the car, find the edges without falling off them.
Owner Gene Haas struck a practical tone too. Balancing the final throes of 2025 with the design-and-build sprint for 2026 has been a test of bandwidth, and the real answers won’t arrive until the car is pounded around in anger. The one constant he highlighted is continuity: Ocon and Bearman remain, as do the core design and engineering groups. Given how ruthlessly competitive the midfield proved last season, that stability is a currency Haas will hope to spend wisely once development races away in the spring.
There’s only so much you can read from renders, but the intent is clear enough. The evolved Haas palette remains clean and familiar, now accented by a thicker streak of red that does more than nod to the new partner. Underneath, the team talks up a leaner package that fits the 2026 template and a car meant to be simpler to operate, a quiet admission that execution as much as outright pace has separated winners and losers in recent seasons.
The bigger story is the Toyota link. Even without diving into the weeds of the 2026 technical regs, a major manufacturer aligned to Haas is a conspicuous step-change. Expectations will rise accordingly. How that translates on the stopwatch depends on reliability out of the box, how quickly the team unpicks the new car’s operating window, and how sharply the upgrade cadence hits once everyone has real data.
For Ocon, the brief doesn’t change: be the metronome on Sundays and prod the development path in the right direction. For Bearman, now properly embedded after his 2025 graduation, this is the chance to turn promise into points week after week. With the grid reshuffling under new regulations, the early races will be a moving target. The trick is to move faster.
We’ll start getting answers in Barcelona. Until then, Haas has planted its flag for the new era — and this time, it’s dipped in Toyota red.
