TEAM PREVIEW: Haas – All you need to know about the team ahead of the 2026 F1 season

Haas returned to the midfield battle over the 2024 and 2025 seasons, with new team boss Ayao Komatsu taking them from the foot of the Teams’ Championship standings to seventh and eighth respectively. But can the outfit get back to the highs of 2018 – when they placed fifth overall – as F1 heads into an all-new set of regulations? Here’s their 2026 lowdown…

Drivers for 2026

Esteban Ocon #31: 1 Grand Prix win, 4 podiums, 483 points, 180 starts
Oliver Bearman #87: Best finish of P4, 48 points, 27 starts

Like most teams, Haas will field an unchanged driver line-up for the 2026 season, with experienced Frenchman Esteban Ocon continuing alongside Ferrari-backed Briton Ollie Bearman, who starred during his first full season in the sport.

Ocon, now 29, joined Haas in 2025 after five years with the Alpine/Renault operation, where he claimed his sole F1 victory to date at the 2021 Hungarian Grand Prix.

It is the latest in a sizeable list of teams he has represented – Ocon’s debut coming with Manor midway through 2016, before two seasons at Force India/Racing Point, a year on the sidelines as Mercedes’ reserve, and then a move to Renault, who later morphed into Alpine.

Switching to Haas also brought a reunion of sorts with team boss Ayao Komatsu, who engineered Ocon during his first F1 test outing with Lotus back in 2014.

Meanwhile, 20-year-old Bearman has already marked himself out as one of F1’s future stars, beginning in 2024 when he made a spectacular super-sub debut for Ferrari at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix – scoring points in place of the unwell Carlos Sainz.

He built on that through 2025 – learning some valuable lessons along the way – to deliver an impressive rookie campaign, with the standout moment coming via a battling drive to fourth position at the Mexico City Grand Prix.

How did they do in 2025?

It was all change for Haas a couple of years ago when long-time team boss Guenther Steiner departed on the eve of the 2024 season and Director of Engineering Komatsu – who had also been with the squad since their 2016 debut – took over.

After overseeing a rise from the bottom of the Teams’ Championship to seventh in the standings across his first year in charge, a particularly close midfield battle in 2025 saw Haas drop back to eighth place, despite improving their points tally (79 to 58).

That return marked a solid recovery from the season opener, where instability issues plagued Haas’ VF-25. Double points finishes were achieved in China, Bahrain, the Netherlands, Mexico and Las Vegas, matching the team’s record from 2018, while a final batch of upgrades in Austin delivered a late-season boost – particularly on Bearman’s side of the garage.

Alongside this, Japanese automotive giants Toyota continue to strengthen their relationship with Haas, becoming title sponsors for 2026, meaning there will be ample support and resources for the outfit to call on as F1 enters a new era of regulations.

History

Until this year, and Cadillac’s arrival, Haas were the most recent all-new F1 entry – Gene Haas’ eponymous team hitting the track in 2016 with an American headquarters and UK factory, and technical partnerships with Ferrari and racing car manufacturer Dallara in Italy.

After brilliantly finishing sixth and then fifth with Romain Grosjean in their first two races, Haas placed a respectable eighth in the Teams’ Championship over the 2016 and 2017 seasons, before rising to fifth in 2018, which remains their best-ever classification.

They ended their next two campaigns down in ninth, before the low of a point-less 2021 campaign that left them at the very bottom of the standings. A brief recovery to eighth was followed by another P10 finish in 2023, leading to Steiner’s aforementioned exit.

Despite playing down expectations, Komatsu ended that rot by guiding Haas to a much-improved seventh in 2024, and followed it up with a P8 finish in 2025.

Greatest achievement

As touched on above, Haas instantly made their mark in F1 via Grosjean’s back-to-back top six finishes in 2016, and it took them just three seasons to break into the top five of the Teams’ Championship, which remains a team highlight.

Other worthy mentions are Grosjean’s P4 finish in Austria in 2018 and Bearman’s P4 result in Mexico last year, as well as Kevin Magnussen’s shock pole position in a wet and wild Qualifying session at the 2022 Sao Paulo Grand Prix.

One key goal for 2026

It goes without saying that all 11 teams have faced an enormous task in preparing for the 2026 rules reset, with not only the cars and the way downforce is generated from them changing significantly, but also the power units under the bodywork.

This brings opportunity and jeopardy in equal measure, but Bearman – speaking to F1.com towards the end of 2025 – expressed cautious optimism about Haas exploiting the former category.

“I’m excited to see how next year’s car drives,” he said. “It’s definitely going to be interesting – also to see the challenges that it throws up at us.

“All of the lessons learnt across the previous two eras of car are being put into practice on the new one. We’ve been bringing upgrades and bringing performance recently, which shows that the aerodynamics team is working very well.

“It’s a challenge for everyone, but hopefully we’ll have a quick car and we can fight at the front. That’s the plan!”

While fighting at the front might be pushing it, building on the last two seasons to lead the midfield pack would be a realistic target for a team that has grown significantly over the last couple of years.