Bearman blames Haas car after Hungary collapse

Ollie Bearman said Haas' car was to blame for a "horrible, horrible weekend" at the Hungarian Grand Prix after he finished last of the classified runners, two laps down, and headed into Formula 1's summer break feeling the team had gone "back to square one."

The rookie qualified 17th at the Hungaroring and came home 19th, while team mate Esteban Ocon qualified 15th and finished 16th, leaving Haas with both cars out of the points again. Bearman said the scale of the drop-off, coming just two races after a much stronger feeling at Spa, made Hungary his worst weekend of the season.

"It was definitely the worst of the year," Bearman said after the race. "We're seeing that the car is not performing as it should, and yeah, I feel like I've done a good job." He said he had done his maximum, but the feeling in the car was "nothing like what I had in Spa" before concluding: "So, yeah, it's the car."

What alarmed Bearman most was not just a lack of pace, but how unpredictable Haas has become from one circuit to the next and even between its two cars. He said the team can suddenly be missing "10, 15 points of load" on one side of the garage, leaving it "just hoping you're going to be on the good side" to have a decent weekend. If not, he said, "you're going to have a really, really long one. We had a long one."

That points to a deeper problem for Haas than a single poor result. Bearman said he had not completed a lap all weekend with any confidence in the car and described the race as exposing "how poor we are in terms of inconsistencies." After showing stronger form at Spa and after Bearman scored points three times in the opening five grands prix, Haas has now gone five races without a point since Monaco at the start of June and slipped down the order.

Bearman said the recent progress now felt lost. "It's just been a horrible weekend," he said. "From the first lap that I've done until now, I've not been able to find any confidence, and it's like all that progress we made over the last two events, maybe, has been erased." He added: "I lost all level of confidence in the car."

Ocon struck a slightly calmer note about his own weekend, saying Haas had at least extracted its maximum more consistently on his side of the garage, but he agreed on what the team now needs. Esteban Ocon, Haas driver, said: "We need to look at the next upgrades on the car and hope that they will make a difference." That leaves Haas going into the break searching not just for more speed, but for a car that behaves predictably enough to stop one bad weekend wiping out the gains of the last one.