Haas Picks 21-Year-Old Camara to Replace Ocon and Ends Up With the Grid's Youngest Lineup

Haas spent Thursday making its future considerably younger. The American team announced that Rafael Camara, the 21-year-old Brazilian who leads the Formula 2 standings in his rookie season, will replace Esteban Ocon from 2027 on a multi-year deal, AP reports. Ocon is 30, has won a Grand Prix, and announced last month that he is leaving after two seasons. In his place Haas is promoting a driver who has never started a Formula 1 race, to partner Oliver Bearman, also 21, in what AP reports is the youngest driver lineup by combined age so far confirmed for next season.

How did a rookie F2 driver win an F1 seat?

In a shootout nobody outside the team was meant to see. Haas tested its reserve drivers Ryo Hirakawa and Jack Doohan and the reigning F2 champion Leonardo Fornaroli in its programme, Reuters reports, and Camara became the leading target after a private test at Portimao in August. Team principal Ayao Komatsu said Camara handled the car very well on a limited amount of learning time, and pointed to something beyond raw speed: the way the young driver organised the people around him to get the best out of himself. That is a revealing criterion for a small team. Haas was not only timing laps; it was auditioning a working method, and the rookie beat a reigning F2 champion and two of the team’s own reserves to the seat.

Why are Haas betting on two 21-year-olds?

Because the younger one already inside the team has outscored the veteran. Bearman has 23 of Haas’s 30 points this season, Reuters reports, and finished sixth in the Singapore sprint after starting 13th on a track where overtaking is close to impossible, in a race remembered for its record nine retirements. Komatsu said on Thursday that Bearman has shown he is ready to be a team leader, and that his own extension, not yet formally announced, is a matter of timing and final details. Both drivers came through the Ferrari Driver Academy, which joined them in 2022, and Ferrari is Haas’s engine supplier and technical partner, AP reports. The bet is coherence: one academy, one supplier, two drivers the team can develop together rather than a senior pro on a short clock.

What does Ocon lose in this?

A seat, and possibly a grid. Ocon has one Grand Prix win, from his Alpine days, and at 30 he is exactly the profile teams usually keep for stability. Instead he told reporters he is a free agent and would prefer an F1 reserve role with another team to racing in a different series, AP reports. That preference says something about the current market: a proven winner would rather hold a reserve contract inside the paddock than take a full-time drive outside it, because reserve seats at big teams have become a genuine route back. His departure also lands in a busy week for the 2027 grid, with the title arithmetic in Austin still open and Kimi Antonelli able to seal the championship at the United States Grand Prix when Haas races at home next week.

Who is Camara, beyond the academy label?

A driver who has won at every level he has stayed at. He joined the Ferrari academy in 2022 after a scouting competition, won the Formula Regional European title in 2024 and the Formula 3 title in 2025 with Trident, and now leads F2 as a rookie with Invicta Racing, with three wins and five pole positions, Reuters reports. He holds a seven-point lead over Red Bull junior Nikola Tsolov with the Qatar and Abu Dhabi rounds left, and AP notes he would be champion if those final rounds could not go ahead. His signing also restores a small piece of grid history: with Gabriel Bortoleto confirmed at Audi, 2027 will be the first season since 2016 with more than one Brazilian driver in Formula 1, AP reports.

What happens next for Haas?

Two announcements and a title fight. Bearman’s extension is the formality Komatsu described, expected in due course, and Camara still has an F2 championship to finish before he can think about winter testing. The risk in the plan is obvious and the team has accepted it in public: a lineup with a combined age of 42, no Grand Prix wins between them, and a car that sits seventh of 11 teams. The counter-argument is in this season’s points column, where the 21-year-old already at the team has done most of the scoring. Haas looked at that column, looked at a private test in Portugal, and decided the future was not the thing to wait for.