Despite a promising new Haas underbody, Esteban Ocon fell short of expectations in Japan, while teammate Oliver Bearman scored points
Esteban Ocon had a difficult time during the Japanese weekend. The Frenchman opted for an alternative strategy and started on hard tires, but this did not pay off. And he still can’t get to grips with the new Haas underbody: “No, I think we’re still missing four to five tenths,” Ocon explains when asked about the team’s new underbody.
“It’s good overall that the team made the update so quickly and that it worked on one car, which is very good,” he adds. But despite the positive impact of the update on Oliver Bearman’s car, Ocon fell short of expectations. ‘We need to understand the data from his car and implement it on our car,’ Ocon continues.
Bearman secures the last point
Oliver Bearman had more confidence and secured the last point of the race with a tenth place finish. “I think on Saturday and Sunday we did the maximum we could. To be honest, I was quite surprised by our performance in qualifying, given our slightly weaker performance on Friday,” explains Bearman.
He is confident that the new underbody has had a positive impact on performance: “We have a different underbody this weekend and it seems to be working as expected, which is really good.” However, despite the progress made, he was unable to keep up with the faster cars such as Williams or Racing Bulls: “We didn’t really have the pace to compete with Williams or Hadjar, but we’ll take what we can get.”
The difficulties with the new underbody
Although Bearman benefited from the new underbody, Ocon struggled to achieve the same performance. Ayao Komatsu, the team principal at Haas, explains the challenges: “We made an adjustment to the underbody for Esteban on Friday evening, but in the first sessions the difference was not immediately clear. After another adjustment in FP2, we could see that the underbody had a positive effect.”
Komatsu goes on to explain that despite the progress made with Bearman, the team is still not entirely sure why Ocon did not benefit from the same improvement. “We fitted the car for Esteban with the same underbody on Friday evening. Both cars should have had the same specification. But we still don’t fully understand why Esteban was unable to show the same performance,” said Komatsu.
Further developments necessary
However, the Haas team principal remains optimistic that the team’s new developments are on the right track. “It was a risk to introduce the underbody so quickly, but it worked, and that shows that we are making the right decisions,” says the Japanese.
Nevertheless, he emphasizes that this is only the first step and that the Haas still lacks performance. “There are many other areas that we need to develop and we can’t shortcut the process. But this success gives us confidence that we have taken the right steps.”
“It’s an encouraging first reaction after the problems in Australia. We are confident that we can further improve performance with further testing and adjustments,” adds Komatsu.
Ocon is confident despite the disappointing result: ”It will take a while, but I’m confident that we can implement the update on our car as well.”
Bearman is also optimistic and hopes that the team can build on its recent form in the upcoming races: “I feel very confident pushing the car, and if I can maintain that feeling in the next few races, I hope we can continue to be competitive.”
