Though it is unclear why, Haas has announced that Ryo Hirakawa will replace Esteban Ocon for the remainder of the weekend.

"Hirakawa (32), a two-time winner of the FIA World Endurance Championship (2022, 2023) and 24 Hours of Le Mans Winner (2022) with Toyota GAZOO Racing, participated in FP1 at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez on Friday 30 October, his third free practice outing of the season driving the VF-26, finishing 15th overall," said the American team in a statement.

"The Japanese driver will partner teammate Ollie Bearman through final practice and qualifying on Saturday and Sunday's 71-lap grand prix, Hirakawa's Formula 1 race debut.

"No further statements will be made at this time."

However, in a further twist, the team admitted that the move was "not due to illness".

Ocon has already been dropped for 2027, the Frenchman to be replaced by Brazil's Rafael Camara. Interestingly, in 2024 he was dropped for the final race of the season in favour of Jack Doohan.

As we said, the American team is giving no further insight, however it should be noted that on Friday, team boss Ayao Komatsu was noticeably furious when asked about reports of Oliver Bearman making "excessive wage demands" of the team, and openly querying the source of the rumour.

"I have no idea where that comes from," he replied. "Honestly. I've experienced this sometimes this season as well. Some people say there's no smoke without fire, but really, some people invent the story. You know, what happened in Miami, about apparently I had an argument with Esteban Ocon? That's just absolutely zero truth in there. Even those people claiming that they had some insider information, etcetera, absolute total nonsense.

"And this one, again, I don't know who smoked up this six-million euro number. That's the first time I saw it on Instagram or something that Stuart forwarded to me. I was just like, "Oh, another great somebody came up with this, a good thing to stir whatever up."

"I have no comment to make because it's just not even close to the truth. Why do we engage in such absolute nonsense? What's the point of it? Those people are clearly not trying to help anything, right? They're just trying to... It's amazing these days that people don't check the source. So, okay, I want to get some more clicks, I want to get some more likes, so they cut and paste those stories and keep running with it. Before you know it, there are 20 people running the stories, so they think it's the truth. It's absolute nonsense."

Some are speculating that the reason for dropping Ocon relates to a tetchy radio exchange during FP2 when he openly questioned the decision by Laura Mueller to switch him to medium tyres. "Don't do that to me," he told her. "I wanted softs," he insisted. The Frenchman subsequently heading out on the red-banded rubber.

Were questioning the suggestions of one's engineer a reason for dismissal more than half the current grid would be out of work, most notably a couple of world champions.