Haas upgrades are working but the search for performance continues

At Spa, Ollie Bearman and Esteban Ocon qualified in P16 and P18 respectively before they each gained two spots on the grid from penalties for others. The one thing they needed was a good start and a clean race, but first-lap contact between the pair saw both pitting due to punctures.

While the early Safety Car for the George Russell incident mitigated that somewhat, their races were still compromised. Having both completed the bulk of laps on two sets of hard tyres, they finished in P14 and P17 as Haas logged their fourth race in a row with no points.

It’s clearly not where the team want to be. A lack of rear downforce is the key weakness of the VF-26, while deployment issues during the weekend added to the woes at Spa.

However, there were positives to be drawn from the weekend. While not yet producing the needed gain in performance, a new front wing improved the handling, with Bearman reporting that it gave him more confidence.

It’s a good platform from which to find that missing lap time with future upgrades.

“We had decent pace,” the Briton said after the race. “We were a step forward relative to the Williams, which was not really the case in Silverstone race pace, and we seem to have closed a bit the gap to Audi. I was more or less similar to Nico [Hulkenberg]'s pace for the majority of the final stint there.

“So it shows that we're in a better place, and the positive is that the car feels much better to drive. I can lean on it more, I can push it more to the limit and do fewer mistakes, because it's much 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 an inconsistency in parts. The Frenchman’s frustration continued at Spa.

“Silverstone and Japan were the two where we had normal car performance,” he noted after the race. “We are looking with the engineers, and it has been very, very difficult. We need to understand as much as we can, and so far it's quite difficult to get everything under control. We have a huge, huge deficit; it’s like we can't do anything.

“It just gets obviously disappointing the more you go through the weekend, when you start seeing the issues. But I trust the team to fix them. At some point, we will get the hand on the issues. At the moment, they are they are killing us, definitely.”

Team principal Ayao Komatsu accepts that there have been inherent problems in the VF-26 since the start of the season, and that it took too long to identify them.

However he insists that recent upgrades have been doing what they are intended to do, even if that might not be reflected in grid positions.

“We brought new parts in Montreal,” Komatsu said at Spa. “They have delivered mostly on the areas we expected. The issues we have, when you talk about under-delivery, that's not linked to the upgraded package. It's from race one, Bahrain testing. So that hasn't changed.

“I think the upgrades have delivered the performance, but the issue is something else, the characteristics. The downforce itself is delivered. But is it a usable downforce or not?

“Not really, depending on circuit. For instance, if you look at first two races where we performed, Melbourne and Shanghai, that kind of played to strengths of our car, and then masked the weakness of our car.

“Then you go to places like Miami, it started showing the weakness. And then more recent races, and our understanding is quite a lot better. I wouldn't say the upgrades didn't deliver. It's just the fundamental underlining handling characteristics we had on this car, which wasn't evident in race one/two, but started becoming evident in race five.

He added: “We'd like to improve the team so that things we find in race five in the future, we'd like to find out in race one, or pre-season testing. But that's the process to improve the team.”

That’s more of a long-term project. Meanwhile up next is Budapest, where Bearman hopes the slow-speed nature will be favourable to Haas.

“We have a downforce limitation, but we were also quite limited in the straights this weekend,” commented Bearman at Spa. “So hopefully Hungary can bring a bit more performance, and I'm more looking forward to it, given I was confident with the car out there today. So let's see what it brings next week.”

Bearman will have slightly less track time than usual in Hungary, as he hands over his car to Haas reserve Ryo Hirakawa for the opening practice session.