Haas need to understand why they were "so bad" at the Hungaroring
Haas endured another frustrating weekend at the Hungarian Grand Prix, with both drivers finishing outside the points as the team continued to struggle for pace while waiting for its next major upgrade package.
The American outfit never looked capable of challenging the midfield at the Hungaroring, opting for conventional two-stop strategies with both Esteban Ocon and Oliver Bearman. Despite making no strategic gambles, Haas was unable to climb the order, underlining the limitations of its current package.
Ocon made an encouraging start and briefly looked capable of fighting for the points, but as the race developed, the lack of outright pace and increasing tyre degradation left him unable to defend against faster rivals. He eventually finished 16th.
Bearman's afternoon proved even more difficult. The British rookie endured an incident-filled race, spinning at one stage before receiving a five-second penalty for ignoring blue flags as Oscar Piastri attempted to lap him. The penalty compounded an already disappointing weekend, leaving Bearman classified 19th.
The 21-year-old admitted he never felt comfortable behind the wheel throughout the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend and called on the team to understand the dramatic loss of competitiveness compared to Spa.
"It was a very long day, as we were anticipating. The lack of qualifying pace was exacerbated in race trim as there was so much sliding and degradation.
"Apart from that, I just couldn’t overtake so I got stuck and didn’t have any pace anyways. We need to understand why Spa was so good and this weekend was so bad, because the feeling has been the complete opposite and I’ve lost all confidence in the car.
"I haven’t done a lap in the car this weekend and felt good, so we need to understand why and take a long and hard look at things," Bearman concluded.
Ocon echoed his teammate's concerns over the car's performance but took encouragement from extracting the maximum possible result from the package.
"We had a good start once again, we were almost in the points positions, which was very good, but we can’t keep the cars behind. We are in fact not quick enough unfortunately to keep them behind.
"The tyres degraded quite a lot as well, so we need to look at putting more performance on the car. We need to look at the next upgrades and hope that they’ll make a difference – the team will be on it.
"There’s a lot of positives to take away from this weekend on my side, I’m quite happy we were able to extract the maximum out of the car and that we got the consistency from Friday through to Sunday, now we just need more performance."
Team Principal Ayao Komatsu acknowledged that Haas simply lacked the speed to compete and admitted the team is currently experiencing its most difficult spell in recent seasons.
"It was a very difficult day. Ultimately the car hasn’t got the pace, we tried everything really. We know where we need to improve, and that’s coming. I think this is the longest period in the last two and a half seasons that we’ve not had a car that we can do something with, or be challenging for the points.
"That’s not where we want to be, everybody knows that, and everyone is working hard to find the solution. There’s some solutions in the pipeline, but honestly, we will only see what they do when it comes, so up until that point we just have to do our best with what we’ve got.
"The pit stops were good, the previous few races we were a bit up and down with them on the operational side, so having clean stops was good to sign off before summer shutdown.
"We just have to focus on the areas that we have control of and do the best job we can, and then when we improve the car, we will make sure we turn it around."
