Haas problem is so severe it thought car was broken

The problem that wrecked Haas’s Formula 1 season opener, and will not be fully resolved for several races, was so severe that team boss Ayao Komatsu initially thought something was broken on its car.

An Australia weekend spent detached from the back of the midfield was a total shock to Haas, and observers outside the team. Esteban Ocon was six tenths slower than the next representative laptime in Q1 and Haas was never in contention for points during the chaotic rain-hit race.

“I don't think it's a one-off,” Komatsu admitted in an expansive, and blunt, media session on Thursday at the Chinese Grand Prix.

“It was a big surprise. We weren't expecting that whatsoever based on Bahrain testing. Yes, Bahrain testing, the car wasn't perfect, but we weren't expecting nowhere near as bad as Melbourne.

“Honestly, FP1, the very first lap when the car went out, I thought either something was broken or something's completely out of the ballpark.

“Then when we established nothing's broken…'right, we've got a big issue'.”

With the real pace of the car concealed in testing by its high-fuel running, a strategy that had worked without trouble one year earlier, the assumption within the team and among almost everybody judging from the outside was that in Melbourne the fuel would come out, the softs would go on, and Haas would be about where it needed to be.

Komatsu was extremely confident about that final point on Thursday in Melbourne. But it was not the case at all.

Where the problem is

A weakness emerged immediately, with Haas comfortably slowest of all the teams in high-speed corners on Friday. And that persisted all weekend.

Ride instability at high speed was consistent at the fast Turn 9/10 left-right esses, and Ocon was miles off other midfield drivers just through this corner combination - repeatedly losing three to four tenths of a second.

It is where Haas bled the most time all weekend and even by qualifying, when Turn 9 became more respectable, Ocon was still more than 10km/h slower at the apex of Turn 10 as he kept needing a longer lift and even a dab of the brake to settle the car down in the middle of the high-speed direction change, then carried that speed deficit all the way down the straight to Turn 11.

This had improved slightly through the weekend as the team chased answers on set-up, but Haas was clearly still lacking, and it also sacrificed performance elsewhere. Haas was the slowest on the straights, too, and got weaker in slow-speed corners.

As total aerodynamic load numbers are not said to be the problem, it points to Haas tripping up over the main problem in this ruleset - not total downforce but how usable the car is when the car runs on track at high speed.

“Turn 10 just completely exposed it,” Komatsu said. “It’s got the deep compression in the corner as well. But again, Turn 9 to Turn 10 transition, [we were] just nowhere.

“It's both a combination of aerodynamic oscillation and then our rear downforce characteristics. If you only had one of them you can live with. But when you superimpose those problems on top of each other, basically it just becomes very, very difficult to drive.

“So in essence, through Turn 10, the downforce the driver can extract is probably same as what we had in Melbourne '24. Seriously. Even though in the windtunnel the performance we have on the car at that speed is so much higher.

“You can't extract it because it’s just not usable. So that's what we need to address.”

Theoretically the Haas might be a nice, predictable car with good load in ideal conditions - but in reality, Ocon calls it “quite unstable”. He also pointed to another major issue in these rules, which is getting the car to work across a wide speed range because the performance profile shifts so much from low speed to high speed.

“We have quite a lot of inconsistencies that we are trying to figure out, that we spotted,” Ocon said.

“It's difficult to get the same behaviour from low speed to high speed, which is obviously also very difficult.

“We need to compromise the set-up a lot from low to high speed, which makes it difficult, but we know what to work on. Which is the most important.

“The team knows, and the team will come up with things to try in the very near future.”

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Why it was missed

Haas did not look in trouble whatsoever in testing, even though it did seem it could fall a little bit short of some of the highs of last year. Since the full extent of its woe emerged in Melbourne, though, Haas has realised in hindsight that there had been a clue in Bahrain after all.

Ocon says there were some indications of the car moving around at high speed but the real problem was “not as clear, as straightforward there, as it was in Melbourne” because Bahrain is dominated by low-speed traction zones.

“If you look at high-speed corners, like Turn 6 - yes, it is a high-speed corner, but it's not really a representative corner,” said Komatsu.

“And then looking back now, Turn 12 in Bahrain, it does show that characteristics – but the issue is that's flat. It's not a corner.

“Esteban's kicking himself as well, he said ‘I should have alerted you guys more, but that was the corner that wasn't costing laptime, so I didn't say it, but now I'm experiencing what I'm experiencing in Melbourne, that underlying characteristic was there in Turn 12’.

“So we missed it. Honestly. We knew there was some aerodynamic oscillation, but we worked through it. Then we felt we found a solution which was actually competitive in Bahrain. And then we still focused on the medium/high-fuel runs.

“Had we known that we would have the issue we had in Melbourne, for sure we’d have done more lower-fuel, non-DRS laps because that's when the problems are most problematic.

“But honestly, it was a surprise to us in Melbourne.”

There is another factor, too - that Haas did not pre-empt this in its winter development, even though Komatsu says he had warned the team last year that at some point it would likely encounter the same kind of problem that caught out much bigger teams.

Komatsu admits “we didn’t do a good job over the winter” and “we just missed it”.

“It is actually quite a difficult problem, but it's not something that you can see in the windtunnel,” he said.

“So things like what you have on the CFD methodology, even the windtunnel data tools you have, those are the areas I believe we are so far behind.

“Now we got this issue. I understand why we couldn't pre-empt it.”

China and the short-term impact

The only positives for Haas are that the problem has been exposed at the very first race, and the team has immediately bought into troubleshooting it.

“Imagine we've been mediocre for five-six-seven races, then go to Melbourne and say ‘oh s**t, we’ve got a serious, fundamental issue', then it's quite deep into the season.

“We were all shocked on Friday. Then to some people, it took a day to at least accept we have a serious issue.

“But now we know, everybody now is completely flat out trying to solve the issue.”

The question is how quickly a solution can be found, if indeed it can be. Komatsu is confident in Haas’s capacity to get the answers but accepts the team must prove that’s the case.

It is hoped that an initial short-term improvement can be ready in time for race three in Japan, but as the full problem is “pretty severe” it will require iterative work in CFD and in the windtunnel. Komatsu said it will be “some races” before there is a proper development to address it.

In the meantime, what comes to the track will be determined by how much risk Haas feels it needs to take - and until then, it has no choice but to try to make the best of what it has, starting this weekend in China.

“Of course, we've got the same parts as Melbourne. But, we learned an awful lot in terms of how to run the car, how to get the best out of it with the current configuration,” said Komatsu.

“And then certain things we learn from the race, we’ll be applying all that in FP1. And FP1 will be just a test session using two cars to generate as much data as possible and get as much driver feedback as possible.”

For this weekend, Ocon referenced the need to test “a lot of different things across cars” to see where the best set-up compromise is for its issues at this track. That will be tough to do given it’s a sprint weekend, with only one practice session before sprint qualifying on Friday.

Rookie team-mate Ollie Bearman didn’t help the cause in Melbourne by missing two sessions because of an FP1 crash and an early FP3 spin into the gravel. It has been drummed into him that a repeat cannot happen here.

“We really desperately need Ollie’s feedback as well,” said Komatsu.

“So that's the target this weekend. I said to Ollie, 'you need to do everything from the run plan'. That's the target.

“We devised the test programme considering both cars, considering how many runs we got each car, just so that we can provide the best possible data sent back to the factory and provide feedback from those drivers.

“That's the only way we can move forward.”