Keep it simple: How Haas has emerged as F1's midfield leader

For many laps during Formula 1’s Chinese Grand Prix, Max Verstappen sat roughly 2.5 seconds behind Oliver Bearman’s Haas, unable to get closer, let alone find a way past as they fought for fifth place.

The four-time world champion, in a Red Bull, found himself queuing behind a car from the American squad that finished the 2025 season down in eighth place in the standings.

That image was a good reflection of what Haas has become in the opening two grands prix of the 2026 Formula 1 season.

Two races in, Haas has been best-of-the-rest both times.

Melbourne and Shanghai are about as different as Formula 1 circuits get — one tight and front-limited, the other demanding high-speed stability and energy management across long straights.

Bearman handled both in style, finishing seventh in Australia and fifth in China to help Haas move to fourth place in the standings behind Mercedes and Ferrari, and just one point behind McLaren.

Bearman’s showing on such different circuits suggests Haas’ results so far are not a fluke but something more significant.

The qualifying picture is less clean, and Bearman benefited from others’ misfortunes, namely the two McLarens not starting the race, in China.

The race pace, however, has been genuine across two very different venues, and that matters.

Team principal Ayao Komatsu has never been one for overstatement, which makes his post-Shanghai words more significant.

“I’m almost speechless,” he said. “I really believe we got that P5 absolutely on merit, and that doesn’t happen overnight. That’s an accumulation of effort from previous years, the parallel development of cars last year, hitting shakedown, and we’re learning every day.”

That philosophy — unglamorous and methodical — has always been his approach through his tenure since he replaced Guenther Steiner in early 2024.

“Keep it simple,” Komatsu said after Shanghai. “We need to focus on our own race and get the best out of it in case something happens in front.”

There is no spin in that. He knows exactly where his team is relative to the top four, and he has built a culture around extracting the maximum from a realistic position rather than chasing an unrealistic one.

In the first two races of the new era, Haas has become a team whose results outtalked the man in charge.

Bearman has carried the best-of-the-rest case almost single-handedly at this stage.

Esteban Ocon’s Chinese Grand Prix was messy: a penalty for contact with Franco Colapinto , a slow pitstop, and a points finish that never materialised.

But Bearman’s weekend was another study in composure.

He qualified 10th, survived a near-miss with Isack Hadjar’s spinning car on the opening lap, and converted it all into a fifth-place finish.

In Australia, the Briton was similarly level-headed about where the team stands.

“We were obviously not in the same race at all as the top four teams,” he said. “They seem to be at this stage in a different league than the rest of us.”

While that was the case in Australia, in China, Bearman had the measure of the Red Bulls in the race, although the Milton Keynes squad had a horrible weekend that is unlikely to be repeated.

The real question is whether Haas, the smallest team on the grid in terms of resources, can keep up when development kicks into high gear.

Haas’s lean operational model, the one built around Ferrari’s technical partnership and efficiency rather than sprawling in-house infrastructure, has always been vulnerable to development cycles.

Inevitably, bigger teams will fight back.

McLaren and Red Bull will recover from their Shanghai horror show, and Haas will eventually need to fend off many of the rivals that were supposed to be in its league from the start of the season, namely Williams or Aston Martin.