Haas spent significantly longer developing its 2025 car than many of its competitors – making the team all the more satisfied with the results of the winter tests ahead of the 2026 season.
Haas made a strong impression in the winter tests ahead of the 2026 Formula 1 season. Oliver Bearman finished ninth in the timesheets during testing in Bahrain, putting him at the top of the midfield alongside Alpine driver Pierre Gasly.
Although pure lap times in test drives are not usually overly meaningful, Haas also performed more than solidly in the mileage table. A total of 794 laps were completed during the two weeks of testing in Sakhir. Only McLaren managed more laps (817).
This is a bit of a surprise, mainly because Haas had been pursuing a “two-pronged” approach for 2025 for a long time. While other teams had long since stopped developing their 2025 cars, Haas brought a major update package for the VF-25 to Austin, quite late in the season.
“We somehow managed to make this parallel program work,” says team boss Ayao Komatsu proudly. Because although many other teams shifted their entire focus to 2026 much earlier, Haas is currently apparently ahead of some of them.
Williams, for example, never made a secret of the fact that it was prioritizing the 2026 project above all else. Nevertheless, the Grove-based team missed the entire shakedown in Barcelona and was also slower than Haas in the subsequent test in Bahrain.
Aston Martin, with significantly more financial resources, even ended up at the back of the field in the Sakhir test.
“We are the smallest team,” Komatsu recalls in this context. This made it all the more difficult to reconcile both projects in 2025.
Komatsu: Found “the right balance”
Nevertheless, it was “not an option” to write off the 2025 season early, the team boss makes clear. Komatsu explains that they were determined to fight for sixth place in the Constructors’ Championship until the very end.
“We weren’t able to achieve P6, finishing the season in P8,” says the Japanese, “but it really gave people […] confidence that we ended the season really strongly, probably with the fifth fastest car.”
Haas regularly scored points at the end of the 2025 season, with Bearman even finishing fourth in Mexico, one of the best race results in the team’s Formula 1 history. However, it was unclear for a long time how expensive these results might have been.
Komatsu emphasizes that he believed at the time that he had found “the right balance” in the factory. However, there was always the risk that the long 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 no mistakes were made in 2025. “It wasn’t easy, but at least we achieved all the milestones [during the test drives]. We didn’t miss a single day,” says Komatsu proudly.
Now all that remains to be seen is whether Haas can confirm the good impressions from Bahrain in the first races of 2026. The new season kicks off on March 8 in Melbourne, Australia.
