Ocon set for Haas exit as team closes on replacement
Esteban Ocon is expected to leave the Haas Formula 1 team at the end of the season with Ferrari protege and Formula 2 title contender Rafael Camara the favourite to replace him.
Ocon joined Haas in 2025 to partner Ollie Bearman after his five-season stint with Renault/Alpine ended.
He was narrowly outscored by his rookie team-mate last year and trails Bearman 18-3 this season in what has turned into a disappointing campaign for the team - though Ocon was the more recent of the two to score points, when he finished ninth in June's Monaco Grand Prix.
Haas started evaluating alternatives to Ocon earlier this year with the private testing programme it undertakes alongside technical partner Toyota.
Camara, 2025 F2 champion and McLaren junior Leonardo Fornaroli, Toyota-backed Ryo Hirakawa, and Haas reserve Jack Doohan are the main drivers Haas was able to evaluate in these tests. Of those, Camara is considered the leading candidate to replace Ocon.
Ocon's Haas exit is not official but he expects to leave the team as it stands. He admitted on Wednesday ahead of this weekend's Azerbaijan Grand Prix that "at the moment I'm definitely a free agent for next year" and confirmed he is talking to other teams.
The Race understands that nothing has been signed regarding his replacement. When asked by The Race if it was still an option for him to continue with Haas, Ocon only replied: "Let's see."
Ocon referred to "things in the discussion that are out of my control" - Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu has previously acknowledged that there is a wider commercial element to consider with its driver line-up but stressed that performance would be the first priority.
Haas is understood to have an option to extend Ocon's contract into 2027 but it wants to continue with Ferrari-backed Bearman, who is very highly rated within the team, and Ocon was unable to make a compelling case to be retained on performance alone.
Komatsu said during the winter that he had expected more from the one-time grand prix winner last season, when Ocon had a particularly tricky final part of the year in which he regularly reported issues with his car.
However, this season Haas has struggled more as a team. The gap between the two drivers in the standings is warped by Bearman scoring 17 of his points in the first two races, when Haas was most competitive and he finished fifth in an attritional Chinese GP.
Bearman and Ocon have only scored four points between them in the 12 events since.
The decline in Haas's relative performance until a recent upgrade has also coincided with the team finding both cars behaving inconsistently.
"We're all on the same page," said Ocon. "We're not hiding it. We know it's been an ongoing issue.
"It's reassuring that I'm doing a good job. My performance hasn't been an issue this year. I've performed every time I had the car.
"And I've been the last one to score in Monaco. I was almost scoring in Madrid [he finished 11th in the Spanish GP]. There's been a lot of times where I've performed when the car was underperforming. It's been clear."
Ocon is understood to be keen to continue in F1 as he feels he still has more to prove. A race seat will be difficult to find for 2027, though, with the grid mostly set and no obvious opportunities left.
However, he could take a reserve driver role if there was a path back to a race seat in the future.
This will be the second time Ocon has encountered this, having been forced onto the sidelines early in his career when he lost his seat for 2019 after Force India collapsed and was turned into what was Racing Point, and is now Aston Martin, by Lawrence Stroll.
