Lights, Camara, action: How Haas picked F1's latest rookie for 2027

There's one simple reason why Rafael Camara is now the proud holder of a Formula 1 contract, and an all-access pass to the top table of motorsport as he prepares to replace Esteban Ocon at Haas for 2027. Team boss Ayao Komatsu summed it up best: "He was the quickest - that was a very simple answer! Definitely, he was impressive."

In the chain of events that led to Camara's signing for next year, where he's expected to join Oliver Bearman once a few contractual details have been thrashed out with the Briton, Haas did something that's genuinely not been seen in F1 for a while: it put together a good, old-fashioned shoot-out for a drive, using its testing of previous cars (TPC) programme to assess a clutch of prospects. Four drivers, three tests, a 2025 Haas chassis, and Ocon's seat as the prize.

Ever since it became apparent that Ocon was out at the end of 2026, Komatsu has been consistent with the goal of the tests: find the quickest driver available. Commercial value would only factor in if the data demonstrated that two drivers were 'tied' on their performance levels shown across the tests, but ultimately this did not need to be a consideration in Haas' decisions. As Komatsu stated back in July, "the main thing is performance. We're not going to put in somebody who's slower because he's Japanese or Italian or whatever, we don't care."

The tests boiled down to two days in Portimao over August, and then a visit to Jerez after this year's Spanish Grand Prix in September. Haas had run other TPC tests in that time to perhaps identify some of the players in its main shoot-out, but these were the key evaluation sessions and a chance to properly benchmark the contenders for next year's drive. At Portimao, Camara was joined by Leonardo Fornaroli, McLaren's reserve and the reigning F2 champion, along with Haas' own reserve and Toyota WEC driver Ryo Hirakawa. Its other reserve driver Jack Doohan would then loop in at Jerez, with Hirakawa the benchmark and 2024 Super Formula champion Sho Tsuboi. Although Tsuboi was not necessarily in contention, there was nonetheless an opportunity to blindside his rivals with a rapid turn of pace.

Haas had been able to take a look at Fornaroli before Portimao. In terms of profile, the Italian has garnered a reputation as a smooth and incredibly consistent driver, one perhaps more predisposed to rattling off a low-variance race stint to a target time, rather than a driver likely to reel off a qualifying time half-a-second faster than his team-mate. A couple of impressive FP1 runs with McLaren and a TPC run with Haas earlier in the year suggested to the team that he was worth a try.

At the same time, Haas did not have the opportunity to look at Camara. The team's relationship with Ferrari perhaps opened that door, certainly in terms of access, but there was no obligation on Haas' side to pick him for 2027 - and nor was there any obligation from Toyota to pick one of its own talents either.

"From the very moment we started talking with Toyota, I knew that Akio-san [Toyoda] was very keen to get one of his drivers to the race seat in 2027," Komatsu explained. "So I went to see him in person in Tokyo before we signed anything, because I didn't want any misunderstanding or I didn't want him to invest in the team with a misunderstanding of 'if we work together, we can get one of your drivers to the race seat'. I said to him, 'look, I understand your target, but this driver, whoever your driver is going to be, has to be the fastest one.'

Reserve driver Hirakawa was among those in the frame for the free 2027 Haas seat

Photo by: Guido De Bortoli / LAT Images via Getty Images

"If I chose a driver who is not the fastest, who is not the best, from Toyota, they're going to be labelled as, 'OK, Toyota just poured the cash in to get their driver into F1', then whoever this driver is who got the seat is going to be labelled as a Toyota pay driver. As a Haas F1 team, we're not going to produce the result that we should be producing, because this guy is not the fastest guy. So for all three parties involved, it's not going to work, is it? So I was totally transparent from the start: 'Akio-san, we're going to choose the driver who is the fastest'. And then he's completely happy with that."

Komatsu relayed a similar situation with Ferrari, stating that their pre-existing relationship presents opportunities to look at the Italian marque's driver academy prospects, but driver choice remains ultimately on Haas' terms. This was a similar scenario with Bearman; Haas took a look at him with an FP1 session at the 2023 Mexico Grand Prix, and had been incredibly impressed by his speed and his working relationship with the engineers. At the time, Komatsu himself stated that Bearman had been "better than my expectations", hence the keenness to get him in a car as soon as a seat became available.

And, like Bearman's first FP1 session with the team, it was how Camara acquitted himself behind the wheel that swung the whole thing. If there's been a defining factor of his junior career, it's been his incredible speed and his ability to turn the tap on under pressure: five pole positions across the 10 F3 rounds in 2025, and another five so far in F2 (where he leads the championship). It's taken him a little bit of time to get his feet under the table in F2 with the Invicta team (which also carried Gabriel Bortoleto and Fornaroli to the title), but he now leads the championship after eroding away at Nikola Tsolov's early control.

"All the variations and difficulties thrown at him, he really judged it very well in a very calm manner, professional manner. So overall, that was a clear choice for us" Ayao Komatsu

The TPC test was no different. Camara not only demonstrated terrific pace, but an ability to improvise and adapt when conditions proved changeable. Shifts in wind direction and track temperature might have caught another driver off-guard, but Komatsu enthused that the Brazilian simply took everything in his stride. There was another aspect to the test, too; at one point, Haas provided its drivers with a common set-up and told them they weren't allowed to change anything, just to see if they were able to drive around the car as-was. It's a good test to establish whether a driver can deal with scenarios where it falls out of the ideal set-up window, and Camara was again impressive here.

"In the Portimao TPC test, he was just simply outstanding," Komatsu stated. "I really don't have huge concerns. Of course, there's risks involved in everything, right? Whatever the decision you take.

"But for me, we really wanted to go for someone who's got this natural speed and feeling, because that's something you cannot teach. If you look at some of the F2 races, sometimes he races very well, good tyre management, but sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes his race craft can be improved. But those things, I believe, we can work together to improve. But we cannot teach feelings, right? Feelings he's got.

"That was very, very clear in Portimao testing because the track condition was always changing. Track temperature, wind condition. On top of that, we had some issue with tyre vibration as well.

Komatsu was impressed by Camara's speed and adaptability in the TPC tests

Photo by: Haas F1 Team

"All the variations and difficulties thrown at him. He really judged it very, very well in a very calm manner, professional manner. So overall, that was a clear choice for us.

"In terms of the potential we see, I would say equally exciting [as Bearman], very, very similar. But in the details, I think it's different. What impressed me most with Ollie was, you know, how he understood the overall situation, how he understood his role, how he executed in the FP1 in Mexico, first time in the F1 car.

"That's a very different scenario to what Rafa had in Portimao, which was a clear shootout, right? The first time he's jumping in our car. The excitement about the speed, I would say, is similar, but in terms of how we are impressed with Rafa is really that judging those conditions.

"Because you've got to have a very, very good feel to the car about the grip, to be able to judge those ever so changing conditions. The condition was changing like every minute, every lap, right? No two laps were the same.

"So that was impressive. But also knowing it's a shootout, how he, let's say, created his environment so that he can focus on what he needs to do and how he wasn't fixated about the outcome. He focused on what he needed to do to be himself, to get his best performance, to then understand what's the mechanism for him to do that and then execute was very impressive."

As Komatsu mentioned, if there's a question mark over Camara's abilities, it's his occasional penchant for getting caught up in unnecessary contact during early-lap pinch-points. A clash with Tasanapol Inthraphuvasak on the opening lap of the Austria F2 sprint resulted in the Brazilian taking a penalty, and then a Baku clash with Mari Boya at the start of the sprint was a further blemish to his copy-book. But if there's anyone who knows how to iron this out, it's Komatsu; he worked with Romain Grosjean at Lotus during the start of the Frenchman's career in F1, and helped turn a driver that Mark Webber once termed as a "first-lap nutcase" into a star performer by the second half of 2013 - scoring six podiums that season.

There was still another test to go, however, and Doohan showed up well in the Jerez run. The Australian hoped to earn a second bite at the F1 cherry after being dumped out of Alpine after just seven races with the team, and it's said that he demonstrated enough speed versus Hirakawa - and then the times transposed between the Japanese driver's laps across both tests - to make it slightly less of a foregone conclusion.

But whatever way you cut it, Camara was the winner of the talent show. Between 2018 and 2024, Brazil was without a full-time F1 driver, yet now it will have two of them in Camara and Audi's Bortoleto.

Camara's speed in F2 has not been in question - but racecraft might need a bit of tidying up

Photo by: Clive Mason / Getty Images

It is not known whether Camara will get an FP1 session this year; Haas says it is still yet to sort that out, but it would be handy for the team to assess how well he's able to work with his presumed engineering team for next year and start to formulate that relationship early. Regardless, it's been known for a little while that the 21-year-old is a special talent - and he's now got that opportunity to shine and lay his claim to a future Ferrari F1 seat.

Per Komatsu, it's also a win for Haas' TPC programme, one that only started in 2025 as the team did not have the spare finance around to justify keeping its older cars running. The relationship with Toyota has now facilitated this, and the Japanese brand has a place to park its younger engineers looking for trackside experience before they go off to experience Toyota's other racing activities. Without the ability to assess potential new recruits on-track, Haas might not have come to the same conclusion that Camara was its man.

"This is part of the reason why we wanted to have the capability to do TPC," said Komatsu. "Having a test team and then thanks to our Toyota collaboration, we managed to set up that team last year, [which was] was about getting off the ground, operate professionally, create a good culture, a good team.

If he's able to demonstrate that latent top-line speed and yet prove malleable in the other facets of racing, then it'll be mission accomplished for Haas' TPC shoot-out

"Without TPC testing, it's difficult to say. We have the capability, therefore we could assess it by ourselves. But without doing it, I cannot be nowhere near as confident, right? And then I don't know if I'd make the same decision - probably not, I don't know - because Formula 2 from outside is very, very difficult to understand. I think you guys were questioning when I took Ollie for a 2025 seat, 'he is not performing in F2, are you sure that's the right choice?' But I was confident because we had access to Ollie through FP1s, we knew what he was capable of and what kind of personality he is.

"Without doing this TPC, if we decided to take Rafa without doing it, it certainly feels much more like a gamble. And then do I want to gamble like that? Probably not, but it's a hypothetical situation. You know, this is why we put the environment in place so that we can take it under our control.

"Our team was able to put this mechanism in place and then Rafa came along. It's just all about timing, and then we are ready to assess him and then he's done a fantastic job."

Camara now faces the small matter of replicating his efforts from behind closed doors onto the world stage. His rookie season, then, should be given the grace and the patience that others have been granted; there will be mistakes, and this comes with the territory of making your debut.

If he's able to demonstrate that latent top-line speed and yet prove malleable in the other facets of racing, however, then it'll be mission accomplished for Haas' TPC shoot-out.