Oliver Bearman revealed his qualifying performance was compromised because Haas set his car up incorrectly for Friday’s second practice session.
“My car, to be honest in FP1 it was okay, in FP2 we really struggled,” he explained. “We did a mistake with the set-up and basically it was as if we didn’t run in FP2. It was totally a waste of time.”Bearman was 16th in the second practice session, three-tenths of a second slower than team mate Esteban Ocon. He said the mistake with his set-up left him without valuable reference information for the rest of the weekend on his first visit to Sepang.
“Going into FP3 with just pretty much two push laps, you don’t have enough time to fix mistakes that we’ve done in previous days,” he said. “So that meant I went into quali basically like this and just guessing what to do with the car, with my driving and everything.”
The “incredibly high” tyre degradation made it harder to make up for lost time, said Bearman. “It means that every new tyre you get one push lap on it.
“So if you say that I’ve had four push laps on the new soft heading into quali, well the one on FP2 was a total waste of time, so that meant the two on FP3 were also pretty much a waste of time because we were trying to recover. So we’re just very behind.
“That’s not our true pace, that’s not our true potential, but it’s really not far from it, if I’m honest.”
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A heavy lock-up at turn one left him heading to elimination in the first round of qualifying. “In my second run I locked the front-left which is the outside front into turn one, which is super-unusual and weird and usually tells you something’s up with the brakes so we need to look into that,” he said. “So I came into my final run with a lack of confidence, I definitely left some lap time on the table.”
Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu admitted the team slipped up on Friday. “Operationally, we made a mistake on Ollie’s car in FP2, so that meant in the session he couldn’t get any information, and he couldn’t recover in FP3 with him because the tires only last one lap.
“Unlike Baku, where you could keep running and recovering, it wasn’t the case here, so it goes to show that everything counts. As a team, even though it’s tough, there are lots of specific things we need to look into.
“I’m confident that when we look into it and understand it, we can put a solution in place, like we have done every other time. It’s very tough, but that’s what we’ve got to focus on.”
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