HAAS RUNS THREE DRIVERS AT PORTIMÃO IN AUDITION FOR ITS 2027 SEAT
Haas completed a three-day test at Portimão from 26 to 28 August, running its 2025 car, the VF-25, under the Testing of Previous Cars programme. Ryō Hirakawa, Leonardo Fornaroli and Rafael Câmara all drove. The team had rented the Algarve circuit for the full three days.
Officially this was a development exercise, in practice it was an audition. Haas is working out its driver line-up for 2027, and while Oliver Bearman is expected to stay, the second seat is genuinely open. Esteban Ocon remains under contract for this season, but the paddock increasingly expects the team and the Frenchman to part at the end of it. Bearman himself also drove at Portimão, giving the engineers a benchmark against which to measure the three candidates. That detail says more about the purpose of the test than anything in the press release.
Hirakawa was the most experienced man there. The 32-year-old Japanese driver is Haas’s reserve and a Toyota man, with a career built in endurance racing rather than single-seaters. He has not raced a single-seater since 2023, when he finished fifth in Super Formula, but he has accumulated seven Friday practice outings across Haas, Alpine and McLaren, plus a substantial amount of TPC mileage for Haas. His value on a day like this is partly his own preparation and partly that he gives the team a stable reference point.
Fornaroli, 21, won the FIA Formula 2 title in 2025 and is a McLaren development driver. He made his Formula 1 weekend debut in first practice at Barcelona earlier this year in Lando Norris’s car, and a few days later ran a two-day TPC in the same Haas VF-25. Team principal Ayao Komatsu was direct about why that first test happened, saying Haas wanted to “have a chance to look at him”. Fornaroli reportedly impressed on speed, feedback and professionalism. Portimão was his second run with the American team, adding mileage and continuing an evaluation that has been going on for months.
Câmara was the newcomer, and the one for whom the week carried the most weight. The 21-year-old Brazilian is a Ferrari Driver Academy member, the reigning Formula 3 champion, and currently third in the Formula 2 standings. He did not arrive at Portimão cold. Ferrari ran its own two-day TPC session at Mugello on 26 and 27 August, held alongside Pirelli’s tyre development work for 2027, and put Câmara in the SF-25 specifically to sharpen his procedures, systems management and feel for a high-downforce car before he stepped into the Haas. Dino Beganovic and Antonio Fuoco also ran there. Câmara drove in the morning and then travelled straight to Portugal.
Ferrari is not being subtle about wanting him on the grid. Asked at Zandvoort whether Maranello would back Câmara the way McLaren has backed Fornaroli, Fred Vasseur said simply that they “strongly support Rafael”, and made clear the support goes beyond money. The Ferrari relationship matters here because Haas is a Ferrari customer team, so the link is already close.
Portimão is not the whole process. Jack Doohan is also part of Haas’s assessment, but his run is expected at Jerez rather than in Portugal, and Yuki Tsunoda’s name has re-entered the conversation after he stood in at Racing Bulls during the Dutch Grand Prix. So this was not a one-day decider, more an opening round conducted in public.
Behind all of it sits Toyota. The partnership with Toyota Gazoo Racing has expanded for 2026 to include title sponsorship, making the team the TGR Haas F1 Team, and the testing activity has been formalised as the TGR Haas Driver Development Program. Toyota contributes financially and also supplies engineers and drivers. The arrangement works both ways: Toyota gets Formula 1 mileage for its own drivers and training for its technical staff, while Haas can run a test programme far larger than it could fund alone. A recent example was a TPC run at Fuji for Sho Tsuboi and Nirei Fukuzumi, two established names on the Japanese scene.
What the engineers were actually measuring at Portimão is fairly consistent across a test like this: how quickly each driver adapts to the car, how consistent their lap times are over a run, how useful their technical feedback is, and how well they work with the people on the pit wall.
The pressure on Ocon is easy to read in the results. Haas sits seventh in the constructors’ championship on 21 points, and Bearman has scored 18 of them. Komatsu, speaking before the Dutch Grand Prix, framed the interest in his team as a good problem to have, saying it was positive that other people were interested in them. With few seats available anywhere for 2027, Haas can afford to look at several well-backed candidates before deciding.
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