Ocon blames Haas mismatch after Spa Q1 exit

Esteban Ocon said an unresolved Haas performance problem, not a mistake on his lap, left him 18th in Belgian Grand Prix qualifying as a stark gap to team-mate Oliver Bearman opened up at Spa.

Ocon clocked a 1:47.801 in Q1 and, with penalties ahead, will start 17th, while Bearman was almost seven tenths faster on a 1:47.113 to reach Q2 before ending the session 16th with a best lap of 1:46.779. It was Ocon’s fifth Q1 elimination in the last six grands prix, and this time he said the deficit was rooted in a car that was bleeding time on the straights and unstable in the corners.

Speaking to Canal+, Esteban Ocon, Haas driver, said he was “not particularly angry” because the team expected a difficult session. He said Haas was “really losing out on the straights” and “losing more than five tenths on the straights,” adding that the issue had been present since the start of the weekend. “The lap was decent,” he said. “The team were quite happy with my lap.”

That made the result harder to swallow, because Ocon said the problem was not down to execution. He described a rear load issue that left the VF-26 “quite unstable,” adding that there was “not much more we could do.” He said the team tried to stay closer to traffic on the final run to pick up slipstream and reduce the straight-line loss, but the gain was limited.

Ocon also rejected the idea that Bearman’s advantage came from a better tow plan. He said the Haas cars kept the same pit-lane order and that he had cars ahead of him, including Liam Lawson at a similar gap, yet was still “losing those 3-4 km/h compared to where we should be.” His verdict on the imbalance inside the garage was blunt: “Only Ollie’s car works as it should, so that’s just how it is.”

He said the straight-line shortfall had worsened sharply from Friday to Saturday, growing from around two to two-and-a-half tenths to roughly four-and-a-half or five tenths. Ocon also described the VF-26’s behavior as inconsistent, saying he had been dealing with strange and changeable characteristics for months. Haas brought revisions to the front wing, endplates and front-axle aerodynamic duct elements for Spa, but Ocon said the intended gain did not appear on his car.

Ayao Komatsu, Haas team principal, said the team did not yet understand why Ocon had gone from being happy with the car in FP2 to unhappy in qualifying. Komatsu also acknowledged a deployment issue during the session and said the gap was bigger than it should have been, but added that even without that problem Ocon would not have matched Bearman’s time. That leaves Haas with a broader problem than a single bad lap: a car still short of performance, and a driver-specific discrepancy the team has not yet explained.