Ayao Komatso is not satisfied with Esteban Ocon's sporting result in 2025

Ocon joined Haas at the start of the 2025 F1 season, coming from Alpine, and was paired with rookie Ollie Bearman, who ended up trouncing his more-experienced teammate on all fronts.

Bearman finished ahead of Ocon in the 2025 F1 Drivers' Championship while also out-qualifying him 14 to 10.

That does not bode well for a race winner like Ocon, and when asked about that, Komatsu revealed he was aware of the issue and had a chat with his French driver ahead of the 2026 F1 season.

Komatsu said: “We’ve had a very good ongoing talk over the winter, preparing for this preseason, and then we understand each other.

“He’s totally clear on what our team is expecting of him, and also I’m totally clear on what he needs from the team, so we cleared everything and set everything up before the Barcelona Shakedown, so I’m really happy with that.

“And then the way he approached the Barcelona test, again, absolutely progressed, so we’re working better together as a team," the Japanese engineer pointed out. "Esteban and Ollie are working well together—we’ve got to [work] better together to make progress as quickly as possible.

“At some of the testing we did, Esteban and Ollie’s feedback was very, very similar, which is really nice in these brand-new regulations.

“I think he understands who we are in terms of size of the team, the resource and how we need to prioritise, but also he understood the way of working a bit better ahead of the Barcelona testing, especially in a team like us, so I’m sure he can make more [of a] contribution this year," he explained.

Komatsu added that he addressed issues that Ocon needs to work on himself and not only the team's contribution to the problems.

He said: "If you look purely at a sporting result, without going into details, for sure nobody is satisfied with Esteban’s sporting result last year.

“He’s a teammate against a rookie—yes, an amazing rookie, but nonetheless he’s got 10 years of F1 under his belt. He’s a race winner; he’s a podium finisher, so we expected more from him.

“Obviously it’s not totally his fault," the Haas boss admitted. "It’s 50/50 – sometimes it’s that as a team we couldn’t give him the car that he was comfortable [with], especially in qualifying, and sometimes that was exaggerated much more than others.

“Look at Baku—he really wasn’t happy with the braking performance, and he was miles off in the qualifying pace. Yes, Baku happened to be one of Ollie’s strongest circuits, but we didn’t expect Esteban to be so far off.

“But again, there’s not one reason—it’s not just the driver, it’s not just the team, and each instance is different.

"There’s no common underlining factor, but it’s just the process, how we work together to get to the bottom of it so much quicker and then put things in place for the next race," Komatsu concluded. (Source: Formula 1 Official Website)