Esteban Ocon was somewhat overwhelmed by the amount of information to take in during the first day of running at the Australian Grand Prix, but Haas F1 seems to have good potential.
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The French driver admits he didn’t expect to have to manage so much data and parameters from this first Friday of the season, in a context marked by the complexity of the new regulations.
“There’s a lot going on, there are a lot of details and complications, my head is going to explode with so much information! It’s a lot to take in, but that’s what we have to do as drivers,” he explained after finishing tenth in the second free practice session.
Haas in the mix
Despite this significant workload, Ocon believes the new VF-26 provides a healthy baseline. According to him, the overall balance of the car is quite good, allowing the team to focus on more specific aspects, notably systems optimization and engine energy management.
“It’s interesting to go to another circuit, to see how the car behaves in terms of balance. It’s roughly correct, there are small details to improve, but in terms of energy deployment there is a lot to gain, we have to optimize it and it’s difficult to get around that,” he specified.
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The Frenchman nevertheless believes that the margin for improvement is real if the team manages to maximize the exploitation of the car, both at the engineering and driving levels: “We have everything to gain if we manage to maximize the car with the engineers, but also behind the wheel, if we manage to drive the car as it should be. So we’ll see how it goes tomorrow. Fortunately, our car is good in terms of balance.”
Bearman confirms
Oliver Bearman also drew a positive conclusion from this first day, finishing in eleventh place. The Briton explains that the team mainly sought to understand the car’s behavior on a circuit very different from that of winter testing: “It was a positive day in the sense that we learned a lot and discovered many things on a circuit very different from Bahrain. There are still many points to work on, and I think we have made progress, which is the goal.”
Team principal Ayao Komatsu explains that most of the track time was devoted to energy management, which limited specific work on the car’s pure performance. Despite this, the team sees several reasons for satisfaction: “Since we spend a lot of time on energy management, we haven’t really been able to work on the car’s performance. But the positive point is that the performance is decent and both drivers were quite happy.”
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