'Get my car healthy' - One driver's plea after tough F1 Austrian GP

Esteban Ocon says that his Haas Formula 1 team has to focus on getting his VF-26 “healthy” alongside the usual push for overall performance.

The Frenchman has been struggling with a lack of rear downforce in recent races.

Despite changing aero parts between practice and qualifying in Austria, the team still wasn’t able to address the issue, which is now believed to relate to the floor.

It has made life difficult for Esteban Ocon in races, as sliding in turn hurts the rear tyres.

At the Red Bull Ring, that meant that he was unable to capitalise on a good start that saw him jump up from 15th on the grid to an initial 11th place.

He eventually fell down the order to finish in 16th.

Although he finished only two spots behind team-mate Ollie Bearman, the Englishman hasn’t had the same rear downforce issues.

“The start was mega, the launch was incredible,” said Ocon when asked about his race by Crash.net.

“It's something that we worked very hard with the team to get right, and also the choices in the first and second lap were really good. I kept moving forward.

“I was able to fight for the first nine laps, I would say.

“And then we got the safety car timing wrong again, once again we pitted when the safety car is not there, and then five laps later it comes.

“So that's something that feels like a deja vu, but that's just luck.

“Unfortunately, we struggled massively again. To be honest, I was struggling to keep the car on track towards the end of the race.

“The team has done everything they could to try and fix the issue on the load that we are missing on the rear of the car, and the problem is still there.”

Ocon stressed that the impact on the tyres is the biggest handicap: “I'm running at the bottom of the front wing, we are cooking the rear tyres, and I finished three and a half seconds slower than everyone else.

“So it's fun for nine laps every time I box, but after that I'm just sliding and killing the tyres, and I have to do one more stop compared to everyone else.

“That was very similar in Monaco, it was very similar in Barcelona, and it's still a problem here.

“I think the positive is that we – I think – exploited the maximum out of what we had in hand, but obviously it's very far from where we should be.

“I think there's two issues: getting my car healthy and the overall performance, because even if Ollie's car is healthy, we're still missing some performance.

“So yeah, struggling with a lot with the same things. And we'll keep pushing hard in Silverstone, and hopefully the problem will go away.”

Ocon believes that the team knows where to focus its efforts as it tries to address the problem.

“Apparently it comes from the floor area, but he’s [Bearman] got floor 13, I’ve got floor 14, I tried floor 15, and the deficit is still there.

“We changed rear wing in the beginning of the weekend, that was also not making any improvements.

“We changed front wing, that was also not making any improvement.

“We can't seem to find it at the moment, but it's clear on data, it's there, so unbelievable. I've never seen that before in my career.”

Regarding what Haas can do this weekend to address the issue he said: “We will cycle through I guess quite a lot of parts to find hopefully something that's that will work better.

“It can't be that there's only one floor that is working, we haven't seen that before.

“I have full trust with the team that they will find the problem. It's just that it's been there for quite long now, quite many races, and we are losing time, we are losing progression, understanding.”