Oliver Bearman and Esteban Ocon faced a challenging Friday with Haas during the Dutch Grand Prix weekend in Formula 1. After the Sprint qualifying, the team identified issues with tire preparation and car behavior that still need to be worked on.
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Bearman finished the session in 17th, after a rather unproductive FP1 marked by difficulties with the front wing. Without many references for the Sprint qualifying, the Briton felt he could have been faster but emphasized that the main focus is on Sunday’s race.
“It was another tough Friday, to be honest. We didn’t have a really productive FP1 and faced many problems with the front wing, so we went into the Sprint qualifying a bit in the dark. The goal is still the Sunday race, as that is our best chance to score points, so the Sprint race doesn’t matter as much in terms of position, but it matters for learning for the main GP qualifying,” Bearman said.
Ocon finished the session in 15th and considered that the result represented the maximum possible for Haas. The Frenchman said the car showed reasonable behavior but highlighted a greater drop in performance on the second lap compared to rivals.
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“I think it was the best we could do today, continuing from Budapest and extracting the maximum from the car. The first lap was very good, ahead of the Audi cars, but we had more tire degradation than others on the second lap, so that’s what we need to work on,” he added.
The team principal, Ayao Komatsu, positively assessed the work done on the first day after the August break, despite the difficult conditions for tire preparation: “There is room to improve, certainly, with things like tire preparation, as they are very sensitive, but I think we did a decent job, especially Esteban,” he concluded.
Komatsu added that the team intends to apply the learnings in preparation for the qualifying session for the GP, which will be held in slightly warmer weather conditions on Saturday.
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