Bearman admits Austria form was a “punch in the face” as Haas struggles emerge

Oliver Bearman says it was a “punch in the face” when he was happy with the behaviour of the Haas Formula 1 car in Austria, only for it to be off the pace compared to midfield rivals.

Bearman said over the Red Bull Ring weekend that the VF-26 was the best he’d had all season, and yet he could only qualify 13th and finish 14th.

He stressed that having a tricky car that hasn’t been optimised – while knowing that there was more performance in it – was a much better position to be in.

“Compared to the previous weekend [Barcelona], it's been a shame,” he said when asked by Crash.net about the Austrian situation. “Because you can stomach being what we were, which was the eighth fastest car on a weekend where you're really unhappy with the balance, and say, ‘Yeah, we were the eighth fastest, but we didn't optimise everything.’ 

“Last week, we optimised everything, and we were eighth fastest, and that's a really tough one to take. We actually finished one spot ahead of where we should have, but that was nowhere near the points, almost getting lapsed by the VCARB. 

“So it's been a bit of a punch in the face, to be honest, that weekend in Spielberg, because we came from Barcelona with a really poor balance, but actually a relatively competitive race pace, and all of those things. 

“We saw, let's say, what was missing, and what was stopping us from being in the fight for points. But Austria was a really tough weekend, and a slap back to reality.”

Asked if the team had found any answers in the past few days he said: “There's no answers. The answer is that we've been out-developed and overtaken by our competition.

“So it's not that we've left anything on the table in terms of what we could have done in Austria, it's that we've not brought as much performance to the car since round one as everybody around us, and that's been very clear last weekend.”

Bearman stressed that up to now Haas has been left behind in the race to get upgrades to the car, while noting that there is more to come.

“I think we're just a bit out of sync with the others, so I don't think this is it,” he said. “We have performance coming to the car, and there's been a few challenges. This year so far, up until this race, we brought one upgrade on the car, a real upgrade, and the others have done a lot more. We have a lot of extra challenges that the others don't necessarily face, so that's tough for us. 

“We came from last year, and even the year before, where every upgrade was quite small in the grand scheme of things, because you're three years or four years into a set of regs, but when you're six months into a set of regs, every upgrade can really change your performance.

“So if you only bring one and the others bring three, it's normal that even if you start here, they're doing steps to overtake you. 

“It's not that anything has changed, but it's just that the rate of development is much higher at this stage, where if you look at this time last year, everyone has pretty much reached the ceiling of what the cars can achieve in terms of loads.”