Haas bounces back from "shock" opening race, but F1 car problems not solved

Haas Formula 1 boss Ayao Komatsu has hailed the “amazing reaction” from his team to recover from a disastrous Australian weekend and achieve a double top-10 Chinese Grand Prix finish.

Esteban Ocon finished seventh at Shanghai, while Oliver Bearman made the most of an alternate tyre strategy to reach 10th from 17th on the grid.

This was in contrast to Haas' Australian struggles, where the team appeared to have the slowest car and its racers only finished 13th and 14th after several drivers crashed out ahead of them.

“It was an amazing reaction from the whole team,” Komatsu told F1 TV of the response.

“Australia was a shock to us, not something we were expecting based on Bahrain testing – but, man, what a reaction.

“Everybody – people in Italy, the UK, US, and trackside, working together within the space of several days… Honestly I'm so happy with the way we've been working since that shock to get the result here.

“Everyone has a failure, right? But failure shouldn't define you. What defines you is how you get up from that failure – and I think as a whole team we showed that.”

In Australia, Haas discovered a fundamental aerodynamic flaw in the VF-25 that hadn’t manifested itself in Bahrain testing because of that circuit’s characteristics, where slow and medium-speed corners predominate. The high-load corners at Albert Park provoked bouncing, which forced the team to compromise its set-up.

The Shanghai circuit dates from the same era of track architect Hermann Tilke’s thinking as Bahrain: most corners are slow or medium-speed, with camber changes thrown in to try to provoke mistakes. Cynics in the mid-2000s, when these tracks were built, believed the paucity of fast corners was a deliberate tactic to slow the cars down and make the sponsor decals more visible.

Lance Stroll, Aston Martin Racing, Oliver Bearman, Haas F1 Team

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

This weekend Ocon qualified 11th, missing Q3 by just 0.03 seconds, then passed Alex Albon’s Williams at the start to run 10th early on. Pitting for the hard tyres at the end of lap 11 then entailed a long second stint to make a one-stop strategy work, but it enabled him to undercut the Mercedes of Andrea Kimi Antonelli.

Bearman was eliminated in Q1 so the team opted to start him on the hitherto untried hard-compound Pirellis from 17th on the grid. He pitted at the end of lap 26 and fed out back in 17th place, and had to balance pushing to exploit the better theoretical performance of the mediums with making them last another 30 laps.

“I wasn’t expecting to do a one-stop, I was quite shocked when we went on to mediums,” Bearman told Sky Sports F1.

But Komatsu has cautioned this rebound is likely to be circuit-specific, since the car’s aerodynamic issues have yet to be resolved. If they are ‘baked in’ to the VF-25’s characteristics, then the team’s season is likely to be defined by having to secure maximum gain at tracks that flatter the car.

“I'm not kidding myself to say we solved the problem – we haven't,” said Komatsu.

“So certain circuits we go to, we're still gonna have a big problem – but, when we can operate the car in the way we want, thanks to the circuit characteristics, this is what we can do. We delivered today.”

Bearman added: “It’s the type of track which on paper is good for our car. It’s very smooth, not many bumps, and that’s what we’re looking for at the moment. We’d smooth all the other ones if we can…”