After the first five races of the season, a balance can be drawn at Haas, sixth in the Constructors’ Championship with 20 points. The American team struggled during the opening weekend in Australia, but then steadily improved up to Bahrain. However, the latest weekend in Saudi Arabia saw Ayao Komatsu’s team categorized as the eighth fastest outfit on track. The VF-25 struggled mainly due to two factors, which must be addressed ahead of Miami to return to competitiveness in the midfield.
The balance after five rounds is positive, but the poor result in Jeddah cannot be ignored
After a season opener to forget in Melbourne, Haas made a strong comeback in China, later confirming its progress at Suzuka and in Bahrain. Specifically, in Australia, the American team was the slowest due to completely wrong setup choices, which led to the reappearance of bouncing in high-speed corners, caused by an excessively soft suspension setup. This particularly affected the VF-25’s performance with the softest compound, the C5, in qualifying. With more robust tyres like the C2-C3-C4 brought by Pirelli to Shanghai, the team led by Ayao Komatsu secured seventh place on track with Esteban Ocon and tenth with Oliver Bearman. Later, Suzuka became a key event because the team decided to anticipate developments, introducing a redesigned floor to help fix the bouncing issues seen in Melbourne (Turns 9-10). Pirelli had chosen to bring the hardest tyre range, C1-C2-C3, and the Japanese weekend turned out to be satisfactory, at least on one side of the garage: Bearman made it into Q3 and kept tenth place in the race, showing that with a more stable platform, the VF-25 can remain in the operating window longer. On the other hand, teammate Ocon finished eighteenth.
This result was heavily influenced by a poor qualifying session, considering the limited overtaking opportunities on the historic Japanese circuit. Afterwards, the Bahrain circuit, full of slow corners and stop-and-go zones, suited Haas, finishing eighth with the Frenchman, who finally found his form, and tenth with the Briton. In Jeddah, however, the story changed. The Saudi weekend was characterised by the same tyre range as Australia: C3-C4-C5. In qualifying, Bearman and Ocon finished fifteenth and eighteenth respectively, a sign of poor understanding of the C5 on a flying lap, where exploiting the grip peak is crucial for strong lap times. In the race, the Englishman finished thirteenth and Esteban Ocon fourteenth, showing some improvement compared to Saturday.
There is a correlation between the type of Soft compound in qualifying and the gap to the best of the midfield
It can be stated that Haas’ Achilles’ heel in qualifying concerns the optimization of the C5 tyre’s grip peak, as confirmed by team principal Komatsu: “It’s actually quite difficult to get performance from the soft tyres and I think, as a team, we still have a lot to learn.” The American team will need to find a solution quickly, especially considering the next three rounds: Miami, Imola, and Monaco. In Florida, the C5 will remain the soft tyre, while in the two European rounds the new C6 compound will debut.
The qualifying gap compared to the fastest car each weekend is telling: in Melbourne and Saudi Arabia, with the C5, Haas was respectively 0.9s (although the Australian result was also conditioned by poor setup choices) and 0.5s slower. In Shanghai, with the C4, the gap narrowed to 0.4s, while with the C3 at Suzuka and in Bahrain it was 0.15s and 0.2s respectively.
Race pace is more influenced by the track layout than by the tyre compound, unlike qualifying
Looking at race pace, disregarding Melbourne due to adverse conditions, on fast circuits like Suzuka and Jeddah, the gap to the leading midfield car is about 0.3s per lap, while in Bahrain, with slower corners, the gap shrinks to 0.2s per lap. Finally, at Shanghai, Haas was even the fastest midfield car, as evidenced by Ocon’s fifth place (seventh on track), with an advantage of about 0.05s per lap over Williams. Thus, it can be seen that race pace mainly depends on track layout, where the American team struggles more on faster tracks, while qualifying pace is influenced by tyre type, with the softer ones proving harder to extract performance from. Ayao Komatsu also confirmed this after the last round: “I think in Jeddah we did the best we could, but in the end, we didn’t have the pace to score points. I think our result reflects our performance. On this circuit with high-speed corners, unfortunately, our performance wasn’t good enough. We’re working to improve the car and to understand how to get performance from the softer tyres, as we need to improve in this area ahead of Miami.”
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