Esteban Ocon says Haas has delivered on its promise and they have listened to his issues, while noting that things are going well with race engineer.
When asked if he expected Haas to be ahead of Alpine at halfway stage of 2025 F1 season, Ocon promptly said ‘yes’, but cautioned that it is not over yet. His move to the American outfit has been decent enough. There are a lot of similarities but yet it is different as he feels.
He is not feeling letdown by the promises that Ayao Komatsu made when he signed up. He feels the support of the team as well, who are doing as much to solve his issues whatever he faces and are listening to his directions. In fact, he could spot the weakness straightaway.
“Yes, for sure, there were no lies in what Ayao said,” said Ocon to media. “Things are going as they should be, of course. We want to have more pace. This is the thing that we are focused on and that we need to sort out. But all the rest is very straightforward, very clear, and focused on one target, which is the important one. It’s the track, so I’m happy.
“For me it’s quite transparent, driving the straight-line speed problem is not something that I really focus on because that’s where we are. It’s when you compare to others where you can start to see on the GPS – the delta. But for me I’m focusing more obviously on the balance issue of the car and it’s really good that the team’s been able to try and steer the development with what I’m keeping on saying, where I struggle to rotate the car at low speed but the car is a bit unstable.
“It’s unstable at high speed and this is supposed to help. So we’ll see if actually it correlates to what the team are seeing obviously on simulations. [As for me having a roller coaster run,] there are a few explanations. First of all, until these last two races, it was difficult for us to keep a good consistency level of performance without having one race where we struggled.
“It’s still the case where it’s quite difficult for me to get the right balance in qualifying and to get things under control. In Austria, that was very much better. We changed a lot of things on the car, and the car suddenly felt like it was going in the right direction. There are more things for that to help me. When I arrived into the team, I straightaway spotted the weakness of what I need to go quicker.
“Obviously, all the technical bits are now starting to come for that to improve. We should see the benefit from now and in the second half of the year,” summed up Ocon, who is gelling well with his new race engineer Laura Mueller as well. It is a big step for both of them, considering it is the first male-female pairing on the pitwall in the history of F1.
“For sure, we are learning more and more about the car,” continued Ocon. “It’s going super well, for sure. We’re understanding each other a lot more, working on all the little topics. I’m learning a lot alongside her. And yeah, it’s been strong races. We’ve made a really solid job, without mistakes, and it’s been strong.”
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