Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu admits he expected more from Esteban Ocon in his debut year with the American outfit. The Frenchman reached the top five only once — at the Chinese GP — and even finished behind his teammate Oliver Bearman in the drivers’ championship. According to Komatsu, though, it wasn’t entirely the driver’s fault: ‘Sometimes it was also down to the team.’
38 World Championship points and fifteenth in the drivers’ standings. That was Esteban Ocon‘s final tally in 2025. The experienced Frenchman finished lower in the order than his rookie teammate Oliver Bearman, although there were only three World Championship points between them. Team principal Ayao Komatsu lays out, bluntly, how Ocon’s debut season with his outfit disappointed.
“If you look purely at the sporting result, without going into detail, I don’t think anyone is satisfied with Esteban’s results last year, right?” Komatsu told Autosport. “He’s a teammate of a rookie. Yes, a great rookie, but he still has ten years of F1 experience. He’s a race winner, he’s been on the podium. So we expected more from him.”
‘Not entirely Ocon’s fault’
Still, the Japanese boss doesn’t lay all the blame for the disappointing race results at his driver’s feet. “Of course it’s not entirely his fault, it’s fifty-fifty, right? Sometimes it was down to the team too — we couldn’t give him a car he felt comfortable in, especially in qualifying,” Komatsu continued. “And there are circuits where that gets amplified much more than at others. Look at Baku — he was genuinely unhappy with certain braking performance, and that left him miles off the pace in qualifying.” Ocon then only made it as far as eighteenth on the grid before he was disqualified and had to start the race from last.
“But again, there isn’t a single reason — it’s not just the driver, it’s not just the team, and every case is different,” the Haas team principal continued. “So there is no common underlying factor, there is no miracle cure. It’s simply a process: how we work together to more quickly find out what’s going on and then get things sorted for the next race. That’s something we — all of us together, team and driver — didn’t do so well last year, because I really felt we should have got on top of it faster,” Komatsu concluded.
