‘Dangerous’ but also ‘brilliant’ - Rafael Camara’s F1 debut

New Haas driver Rafa Camara received a reprimand on his Formula 1 debut for what was deemed “clearly dangerous” impeding of Charles Leclerc in Brazilian Grand Prix practice.

Camara weaved and moved into the racing line as he prepared to start a push lap in FP2 at Interlagos just as Leclerc was coming by to complete a lap of his own.

Though he was warned several times that Leclerc was approaching, Camara ended up squeezing the Ferrari towards the run-off at high speed “with a significant
amount of the car off the track”, said the stewards, who upgraded the typical practice penalty for impeding from a warning to a formal reprimand.

“The situation that was created was clearly dangerous and [Camara] should have taken more care to avoid impeding [Leclerc]."

Camara’s incident with Leclerc was a blot on an otherwise solid and steadily improving first day in the car.

He finished 0.86s slower than Ollie Bearman in FP1, and trimmed the gap to 0.57s in FP2, with the biggest part of his time lost in the middle sector - although he had been even closer on the initial hard-tyre push laps before switching to softs.

There was a recurring problem under braking into Turn 1, where Camara had huge run-ending lock-ups in both FP1 and FP2, although several drivers had trouble here.

And he was still trying to smoothen his throttle usage exiting Turns 2 and 12 by the end of Friday as well.

But considering Camara has been thrown in at the deep end with a lot of procedural stuff to learn as well as getting on top of a 2026 car he is driving for the first time, Haas felt he had a “pretty strong day”, head of car engineering Hoagy Nidd said.

“Obviously a massive learning curve today, it's pretty intimidating, but he did brilliantly,” said Nidd.

“He built up steadily through FP1. He was sort of almost a bit reticent to give too much feedback from FP1 and obviously for FP2 he was improving all the time and building with his feedback and his driving, so a pretty strong day I would say.

“Working on procedures, you probably saw us go out, do a few starts, things like that, just the normal bread and butter things that we almost take for granted with most drivers, so we're very pleased with him I think.”