Haas is having a difficult weekend at the Canadian Grand Prix in Formula 1. The new update package brought by the team to Montreal has caused setup difficulties and left the drivers struggling to find balance in the car.
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Oliver Bearman stated that the team spent the entire weekend ‘chasing its own tail’ while trying to understand the behavior of the updated car. The Briton qualified 15th for the Sprint race, but discomfort with the performance led Haas to change the car setup and start from the pits.
After finishing the Sprint only in 18th, Bearman returned to the track for the qualifying session for the GP and secured 16th position on the grid. Even with a slight improvement, the driver made it clear that the team has not yet found the ideal operating window for the new aerodynamic package: “It has been really challenging. We couldn’t find a solution that worked,” said the Briton. According to him, only during the qualifying session for the GP did he finally manage to attack the braking and acceleration zones more because he started to feel more confident in the car.
The young driver explained that just when he began to explore the car’s limits more, new problems appeared: “I was having a lot of front wheel lock-ups when I started pushing harder. I’m sure other teams already discovered this in FP1, but we were so far from ideal at that moment that we couldn’t really attack,” he commented.
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Bearman continued: “The performance is there, but the car’s characteristics have become very difficult,” he explained. The Briton said that the Canadian circuit, full of curbs and bumps, made the behavior even more complicated. “I was literally struggling just to see the corners with the amount of impacts I was feeling,” he said.
The driver also detailed the dilemma faced by the team. When Haas makes the car more comfortable and predictable, corner entries become problematic. When they stiffen the setup to gain performance, the car loses confidence and becomes difficult to drive: “We are balancing everything on a knife’s edge,” he added.
On the other side of the garage, Esteban Ocon had an even greater challenge by debuting the new package only in the qualifying session for the GP. The Frenchman was only 17th on the grid and admitted difficulties adapting quickly to the changes: “It’s a completely different optimization. When I finally started to understand, it was already the last lap of qualifying,” the French driver concluded.
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