Formula 2 title leader and Ferrari Academy driver Rafael Camara is going to make his Formula 1 debut sooner than expected this weekend at Haas’ home race in Sao Paulo.

After sitting Esteban Ocon out of last weekend’s Mexico City Grand Prix in Haas’ favour of calling up reserve driver Ryo Hirakawa, the American F1 team are now making another driver change for this weekend’s Brazilian Grand Prix at Interlagos, as with Hirakawa unavailable due to other WEC commitments, it’s been announced that 2025 Formula Regional European Championship and Formula 3 graduate Camara will get to drive in front of his home fans.

The call-up of Hirakawa for last weekend’s race in CDMX resulted in the Japanese driver picking up a career-best result of P10 and a point for Haas in what was his only race start of 2026 so far, but his commitments elsewhere meant that it was decided that Camara, who’s already been tipped to graduate to F1 with Haas full-time in 2027, would get the VF-26 this weekend.

While it’s been expected that Camara would be a future Haas F1 driver given his strong junior results, including FRECA and F3 titles and currently topping the F2 standings, Team Principal Ayao Komatsu has hinted that some behind-the-scenes work has accelerated his move up.

Speaking ahead of last weekend’s race, Komatsu revealed that Camara, who tested the 2025 Haas during a Testing of Previous Cars (TPC) day in August, had done enough to accelerate his promotion.

“He’s very promising,” said Komatsu of Camara’s TPC test performance. “He’s very impressive, very mature. So we are looking forward to seeing him in F1. And, yeah, hopefully he will show his potential and his abilities this weekend.”

Camara’s appearance this weekend will mean that Ocon’s time at Haas is done for good, with the Frenchman expected to leave the team at the end of 2026 anyway.

Asked about whether or not he would return to the line-up later this season, Komatsu said: “For the moment, no.”

While Komatsu wouldn’t go into detail about what exactly went wrong between himself and Ocon to warrant such a sudden parting of ways, he did confirm that it was definitely over and that Haas moving on from Ocon was the right decision.

“Of course, I would like to have more details to share, but at the moment it’s confidential so I’m not able to,” he said when asked about his relationship with Ocon. “But yeah, unfortunately we don’t continue together.

“But as I said this morning, we believe that this decision is firmly in the best interests of the team, so we’re looking forward for this race with our two young drivers, with Ollie and Rafael.”

Written by

Lakshya