Esteban Ocon arrived in Montreal in no mood to play the diplomatic game. Confronted with a wave of reports suggesting his relationship with Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu had soured — and that Yuki Tsunoda was being lined up as a mid-season replacement — the Frenchman went on the front foot.
"The stories have been fabricated with no foundation," Ocon said ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix. "There were no real sources in there."
The original article that spawned the rumour cycle, Ocon argued, contained a tell that made the rest of the piece worthless to him. He explained: "When I read the article that kicked it all off, they call him Ryo Komatsu, so I as soon as I read that I stopped reading."
Ayao Komatsu, not Ryo, is the team boss who brought Ocon to the squad over the winter — and Ocon was at pains to remind everyone of the depth of that connection.
"I've joined this team because of Ayao, because I've known him for so long. He's been my first race engineer in F1."
That history matters in this context. Komatsu was Ocon's first race engineer when the Frenchman broke onto the grid with Manor in 2016, and the pair worked together again at Renault in subsequent seasons. Ocon's move to Haas for 2026 was framed at the time as a reunion as much as a transfer.
The noise around their working relationship has visibly affected him, however. Asked about the cost of the speculation, Ocon was unusually candid about the off-track damage.
"When it escalates so much and when there is so much going on it effects my sponsors, my family, it effects everyone that is around me," he said.
He went further than most drivers would in calling out the publishers behind the cycle.
"It's not normal that you can fabricate stories like this and just get away with not having any problems for yourself. You can't just lie about things," Ocon said. "I've never faced that in F1 before."
Haas have spent the opening third of the 2026 season slipping in and out of the points, with Ocon's headline result a sixth-place finish before back-to-back retirements in Miami knocked him out of the constructors' top six. Komatsu himself spoke openly on the Essential F1 podcast about the team's struggles with the 2026 development race, and that frank tone has been seized on by sections of the paddock media as evidence of an internal blow-up.
Ocon's response is that the noise outside the garage doesn't reflect the work going on inside it.
"The important thing is the job we are doing inside the team and as long as Ayao is happy with that, and seeing that I'm putting the work in, and that we will deliver the result when they come, that's the most important."
The message to the paddock is, in effect, that whatever Komatsu has said publicly about the team's competitive situation, it is not a personal indictment of Ocon. The internal dynamic, the Frenchman insists, is a long way from the picture being painted externally.
With one of the season's first Sprint weekends now upon him in Montreal, Ocon also made clear where his focus is. He sees Canada — a track where Haas have historically punched above their weight — as a chance to flip the narrative on track.
"I'm looking forward to seeing what this is going to bring us and hopefully it's going to help us to get back into the top 10."
If he delivers on that, the Tsunoda chatter will quieten on its own.
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*Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/ocon-denies-haas-rift-fabricated-stories-komatsu-canada-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
