'It's Ollie's turn to have it first' - Haas splits F1 upgrade plan for Canadian GP

The Haas Formula 1 team is splitting its cars at the start of the Canadian Grand Prix weekend, with Oliver Bearman running a major aero upgrade package on his VF-26, and Esteban Ocon initially sticking with the previous version.

Even if the upgrades prove to be significantly more competitive, Ocon will stay with the same spec for both sprint qualifying and Saturday’s sprint, because there is not enough time to change the car between sessions.

However, assuming the new package does work as planned, he will get it for main qualifying and the race, as there is sufficient time after the sprint to fit the new parts.

The package was originally targeted for Miami, but the team opted to do more R&D work on it before it went into production, taking advantage of the two-week gap before Montreal.

Ocon said it was his turn to wait for the new parts as he was given priority last time.

"Last year in Austin, for example, I had it first in FP1,” he said when asked by Crash.net about the strategy. “Obviously, this year it's Ollie's turn to have it first.

“The problem we have is that we have to validate the package and compare it with the two, and there's not enough time from FP1 to sprint quali to actually change it, because it's half an hour more after the sprint race on Saturday to change it.

“So we need to validate and compare the two packages, which is the most important thing for the team to understand. And if everything goes well, then I have it on Saturday.

“But it was important for us to have a compare, so yes, it's not the ideal scenario, because it's a sprint weekend, but we need to have the update from the cars, and that was the earliest opportunity we had to do.”

Ocon conceded that it will be challenging to adapt to the new package while going straight into qualifying: “It's not going to be easy to adjust, because obviously it's a massive difference.

“The car is supposed to behave very differently, but that's the earliest opportunity we had, because we had to compare the two packages earlier in the weekend."

Team boss Ayao Komatsu is confident that the package will represent a useful gain if it performs as intended.

However, he acknowledged that the team could also still extract more from the previous package, and exploring setup changes is one reason why Ocon will run it on Friday.

“If it works as it should do in the simulator/wind tunnel, it should be just overall better,” he said of the upgrades. “But the thing is, let's say this current package before the upgrade, in Miami, we felt we should have performed better as well.

“And then looking back at how we run in Miami, we have some understanding of maybe we didn't run in a way that we should have done. Actually, we left some performance out there.

“So, it's very, very important to do some tests on the current package, the existing package, before upgrade on one car, and then upgrade, not just to compare current versus upgrade, but some sensitivity.

“So we're going to be doing some work on that in FP1, so we really needed a cross-car compare both on certain setup, and let's say, alternative setup.”

Asked what has changed for Canada, he said: “It's just bodywork, floor many, many parts. It's quite substantial, whether it can translate into substantial performance or not we have to see.

“We didn't feel we had a good enough package to bring it to Miami, but those extra weeks brought us time to develop further, and we started on the way we didn't bring it if it was worthwhile, so we'll see.”