Rafael Camara joins remarkable and historic F1 legacy of excellence

Rafael Camara will become the 34th Brazilian to compete in Formula 1 after Haas agreed to sign the Ferrari junior for 2027, replacing Esteban Ocon alongside Oliver Bearman.

The deal is understood to have been finalised during the recent Singapore Grand Prix weekend, with Haas and Ferrari reaching agreement on terms that will put Camara on the grid next year.

The 21-year-old also arrives with backing from Brazilian state transport and logistics firm Transpetro, commercial support that sat alongside his Ferrari ties in Haas's decision-making.

He now adds to Brazil's long legacy in Formula 1 that began in the 1950s with Chico Landi, who became the country's first starter in the championship, taking six race entries across stints with Ferrari and Maserati between 1951 and 1956.

Since then, 32 Brazilians have followed him onto an F1 grid, from early pioneers such as Gino Bianco and Hermano da Silva Ramos through to more recent names like Pietro Fittipaldi and Gabriel Bortoleto.

The country's golden eras came through Emerson Fittipaldi, Nelson Piquet and Ayrton Senna, who combined for eight F1 drivers' championships between them across three decades.

Fittipaldi won with Lotus and McLaren; Piquet took titles with Brabham and Williams, whilst Senna built his legacy with three championships at McLaren.

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Brazil's glory years

The generation that followed kept Brazil firmly on the grid even without matching those championship exploits.

Rubens Barrichello spent years as Michael Schumacher's team-mate at Ferrari during the team's dominant run from 2000 to 2004, finishing as championship runner-up twice before later fighting for the title again with Brawn GP in 2009.

Felipe Massa came within a single point of the drivers' championship in 2008, losing out to Lewis Hamilton at Interlagos, and remained a mainstay for Ferrari and then Williams until his retirement after 2017.

Nelson Piquet Jr. had a shorter and more turbulent spell in the sport, his time at Renault remembered chiefly for the fallout from the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix, when he was ordered to crash deliberately to trigger a safety car that helped Fernando Alonso to victory.

Alongside them, drivers including Pedro Diniz, Ricardo Zonta, Cristiano da Matta, Antonio Pizzonia, Bruno Senna and Felipe Nasr, all added grand prix starts and occasional points for midfield and customer teams between the 1990s and 2010s.

Following Massa's retirement at the end of 2017, Brazil then went without a full-time representative, a gap broken only by Pietro Fittipaldi's stand-in appearances in 2020, before Bortoleto's arrival restored the country's regular presence on the grid.

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Brazilian decline and revival

The decline in Brazilian representation during this period has been attributed to the rising cost of climbing Europe's junior single-seater ladder, worsened by unfavourable exchange rates and the retreat of domestic sponsorship money once the tobacco-advertising era, built around backers such as Marlboro and Souza Cruz, came to an end, with Petrobras also scaling back its driver programmes.

Earlier Brazilian regional junior championships, including Formula Chevrolet and Formula 3 Sudamericana, also collapsed as car counts shrank and costs rose, culminating in the demise of the revived Formula 3 Brasil championship at the end of 2017 and leaving young karting graduates with no domestic stepping stone before they had to relocate to Europe, often at a very young age.

Brazil's motorsport authorities moved to address that gap in 2022 with the launch of the FIA-certified F4 Brazilian Championship, run by Vicar and the CBA, giving karting graduates a nationally based route that carries FIA Super Licence points before a move abroad.

Bortoleto, now racing for Audi after his rookie season with Sauber, is the most visible product of the renewed pipeline, having progressed through management agency A14 and the McLaren junior programme before reaching the grid.

His case, alongside that of Camara, has coincided with a broader revival in Brazilian corporate backing for motorsport, with domestic investment banks and technology firms increasingly funding drivers as they target international exposure.

Once he lines up on the grid, Camara will join Bortoleto as the second Brazilian driver on the 2027 grid, the first time the country has had multiple representatives in Formula 1 in well over a decade.