(Motorsport-Total.com) – Haas left a strong impression during the winter tests ahead of the 2026 Formula 1 season. Oliver Bearman finished ninth on the timesheets during the test drives in Bahrain, placing him at the top of the midfield alongside Alpine driver Pierre Gasly.
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Although pure lap times during testing are generally not overly meaningful, Haas also performed more than solidly in the mileage table. Over the two test weeks in Sakhir, they completed a total of 794 laps. Only McLaren (817) managed more laps.
This is a bit of a surprise mainly because Haas followed a “dual-track” approach for a long time in 2025. While other teams had long since ceased development of their 2025 cars, Haas brought another major update package for the VF-25 in Austin, quite late in the season.
“We somehow managed to make this parallel program work,” says team principal Ayao Komatsu proudly. Because although many other teams shifted their complete focus to 2026 much earlier, Haas currently appears to be ahead of some of them.
Williams, for example, never made a secret of subordinating everything to the 2026 project. Nevertheless, the Grove-based team missed the entire shakedown in Barcelona and was also slower than Haas during the subsequent test in Bahrain.
Aston Martin, with significantly more financial resources, even ended up trailing at the back of the field during the Sakhir test. “We are the smallest team,” Komatsu reminds in this context. Therefore, it was all the more difficult to balance both projects in 2025.
Komatsu: Found “the right balance”
Nevertheless, it was “not an option” to write off the 2025 season early, the team principal clarifies. They absolutely wanted to fight for sixth place in the Constructors’ World Championship until the end, Komatsu explains.
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“We couldn’t reach P6, but finished the season in P8,” says the Japanese, “but it really gave the people […] confidence that we finished the season really strongly, probably with the fifth-fastest car.”
Haas regularly finished in the points at the end of the 2025 season, with Bearman even taking a fourth place in Mexico, one of the best race results in the team’s Formula 1 history. However, for a long time, it was not clear at what cost these results might have been achieved.
The 2026 Formula 1 cars in their final designs on the racetrack
Although Komatsu emphasizes that he believed at the time he had found “the right balance” in the factory, there was always the danger that the long-term development of the VF-25 could come back to haunt them in the 2026 season.
Komatsu now sees the good winter tests as confirmation that they did indeed not make a mistake in 2025. “It wasn’t easy, but at least we reached all milestones [during the test drives]. We didn’t miss a day,” says Komatsu proudly.
Now it remains to be seen whether Haas can confirm the good impressions from Bahrain in the first races of 2026. The start of the new season is scheduled for March 8 in Melbourne (Australia).
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