in the spa, Ollie Bearman and Esteban Ocon They qualified in P16 and P18 respectively before each gained two places on the grid through penalties for others. All they needed was a good start and a clean race, but contact between them on the first lap caused them both to pit due to punctures.
Although the first Safety Car of the George Russell The incident mitigated that somewhat, their careers were still compromised. Having completed most of the laps on two sets of hard tyres, they finished in P14 and P17 as haas recorded his fourth consecutive race without points.
It’s clearly not where the team wants to be. The lack of rear downforce is the VF-26’s main weakness, while deployment problems over the weekend added to the problems at Spa.
However, positive aspects could be extracted from the weekend. While it still didn’t produce the necessary gain in performance, a new front spoiler improved handling, and Bearman reported that it gave him more confidence.
It is a good platform to find the missing lap time with future updates.
“We had a decent pace,” the Briton said after the race. “We made a step forward on Williams, which wasn’t really the case at Silverstone race pace, and it seems like we’ve closed the gap on Audi a little bit. I was more or less similar to Nico.” [Hulkenberg]the pace for most of the last stint there.
“So it shows that we’re in a better place, and the positive thing is that the car feels a lot better to drive. I can lean on it more, I can push it more to the limit and make fewer mistakes, because it’s a lot more consistent, and that’s good.”
“But we still need to find more performance. The good thing is that the characteristics have been fixed and now we just need more downforce.”
For much of the season, Ocon has been hampered by issues with his car that appear to revolve around inconsistency in some parts. The Frenchman’s frustration continued in Spa.
“Silverstone and Japan were the two countries where we had normal car performance,” he noted after the race. “We are analyzing with the engineers and it has been very, very difficult. We need to understand everything we can, and so far it is quite difficult to get everything under control. We have a huge, huge deficit; it’s like we can’t do anything.
“Obviously it gets disappointing the longer you get into the weekend, when you start to see the problems. But I’m confident the team will fix them. At some point, we’ll be able to fix the problems. At the moment, they’re definitely killing us.”
Team manager Ayao Komatsu accepts that there have been inherent problems with VF-26 since the start of the season and that it took too long to identify them.
However, he insists that the recent updates have been doing what they were intended to do, even if that is not reflected in the grid positions.
“We brought new parts to Montreal,” Komatsu said in Spa. “They have mainly delivered in the areas we expected. The problems we have, when we talk about under-delivery, are not related to the improved package. They are from the first race, the Bahrain tests. So that has not changed.”
“I think the updates have improved the performance, but the problem is something else, the characteristics. The downforce itself is provided. But is it usable downforce or not?
“Not really, depending on the circuit. For example, if you look at the first two races we did, Melbourne and Shanghai, that played to our car’s strengths and then masked our car’s weaknesses.”
“Then you go to places like Miami, it started to show weakness. And then in more recent races, and our understanding is much better. I wouldn’t say the improvements didn’t pay off. It’s just the fundamental handling characteristics that we had in this car, which weren’t evident in races one or two, but started to become evident in race five.
He added: “We would like to improve the team so that the things we find in the fifth race in the future, we would like to discover in the first race or in pre-season testing. But that is the process to improve the team.”
It is more of a long-term project. Meanwhile, next up is Budapest, where Bearman hopes the low-speed nature will be favorable to Haas.
“We have a downforce limitation, but we were also quite limited on the straights this weekend,” Bearman said at Spa. “So I hope Hungary can bring a bit more performance, and I’m even more looking forward to it, given that I’m confident with the car today. So let’s see what next week has in store for us.”
Bearman will have a little less track time than usual in Hungary, as he will hand his car over to Haas reserve Ryo Hirakawa for the first practice session.