The Signal · Column 042

Haas Is Hiring Drivers It Does Not Need Yet

Andrei van Noordt · 30 August 2026 · 2 min read

Haas spent a day at Portimão running Ferrari-linked drivers as part of a future talent plan. No seat was on the line that day. Nobody was signing anything. A team with a limited budget and a long list of more urgent problems chose to spend a day watching people it might need later, under conditions close enough to the real thing that the data would mean something.

Most companies would call that a luxury. It is closer to the opposite. Haas is not testing because it has spare capacity, it is testing because the moment a seat opens, the market for that seat moves faster than any evaluation process can. The work of deciding has to be done in advance, quietly, while there is no pressure and no competition bidding. What looks like a spare day is really the entire hiring decision, moved forward six months to where it is still cheap.

The test session is the interview, and by the time the seat opens the decision has already been made.

I see the same dynamic in AI and data hiring, and almost nobody runs it this way. Teams wait until the headcount is approved, then start meeting people, and discover that the ones worth hiring were in three processes before the requisition existed. The senior end of this market does not sit still waiting to be discovered. It moves through conversations that started long before anyone was officially looking, with people who had already seen the work up close and formed a view. By the time you post the role, you are not selecting, you are queueing.

The other half of what Haas is doing matters as much. Running someone in real conditions tells you things no interview reaches. How they handle a car that is not quite right, how they take feedback between runs, whether the engineers want them back. In our world that is a paid trial on a real problem, a working session on your actual data, an afternoon with the team they would join. Judgment under real constraints is the thing you are buying, and it is the one thing a structured interview is worst at measuring.

For hiring leaders, the practical read is simple. Keep a live shortlist of three or four people for the role you expect to open next, and meet them properly now, while you have nothing to offer and therefore nothing to lose by being honest about where you are.