Haas had a complicated Saturday during the Canadian Grand Prix weekend in Formula 1, but believes it has identified part of the problems that have been limiting the car’s performance. The team finished the qualifying session with only Oliver Bearman in 16th and Esteban Ocon in 17th, after a day marked by radical changes in the car setup.
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Bearman revealed that the team decided to break the parc fermé after Friday to try to understand unexpected behaviors of the car. According to the Briton, the data showed characteristics that were not expected, forcing Haas to backtrack on some setup choices.
“We tried to find the root cause of the problems and took a step back in the setup, but it was still a very difficult race,” Bearman said. The driver explained that the team finally found a car with better balance in the corners during qualifying, although new problems appeared.
“Now we are able to attack the corner entries more, but locking the front wheels a lot,” he said. Bearman also stated that Haas was so far from the ideal pace over the weekend that it only managed to realize some of the car’s limitations later than the competitors, who had already identified these difficulties in FP1.
Ocon also highlighted the difficulties faced by the team in Montreal. The Frenchman finished the Sprint race in 13th and said that Haas made complete changes to the car shortly before qualifying, which made adapting to the new behavior of the equipment difficult.
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“It was very difficult to put everything together. We had only three or four laps to understand where there was more grip and where it was worse with the updated car,” he said. Even so, the French driver believes that the data collected during Saturday can help the team improve for the race.
Haas boss Ayao Komatsu acknowledged that the overall result was disappointing but highlighted positive points in understanding the car. According to him, the team finally began to identify which aerodynamic characteristics are causing specific problems in certain corners.
“We need to start weekends better. In FP1, we were very far off in the setup,” Komatsu said. The manager also recalled Haas’s difficult start in Melbourne last year and expressed confidence in the recovery: “We’ve been through this before. We need to stay united, work together, and solve these problems,” he added.
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