Haas spent much of the Australian Grand Prix weekend stuck at the back of the midfield and starting the grand prix from the final two places, while their competitors in Williams, Alpine and Racing Bulls shone further up the order. It came as a “big surprise” to their team principal, Ayao Komatsu, as they hadn’t been expecting the car to be as bad as it was based on their evidence from pre-season testing.

The team began searching for a reason behind their clear lack of pace in all conditions, believing that something must have been broken. But when they established this was not the case, Komatsu said they knew they had “a big issue”.

While they were able to recover some places on Sunday, the VF-25 car was struggling in the high speed corners of the Albert Park Circuit – with Ocon carrying between 9 and 16km/h less out of the turns 9-10 chicane than the Sauber, Alpine, Aston Martin or Williams. This speed deficit in qualifying was carried all the way down the DRS run to turn 11, meaning he approached this corner around 20km/h down. This pointed to the car having an inherent aerodynamic problem that hadn’t manifested in Bahrain due to the circuit’s characteristics, leaving the team to compromise their setup with the hope of finding a short-term resolution.

“We understand why, but with the issues we have, we cannot solve it for all corners, right? So I think at least we took correct steps during the weekend,” Komatsu said following the Melbourne race.

But the team principal remained convinced that the issue would not be solved for a number of weeks, “some of them can be reasonably short-term solutions, but some of them will be an iterative process, both in CFD and wind tunnel.

“So you’re not going to see a solution for some races – it’s pretty severe.”

Coming to Shanghai, the team were expecting the circuit to suit them more with its low speed corners and long straights but the Sprint format presented a challenge, with just an hour of practice to get the setup right before a competitive session.

The Sprint offered the chance for the team to gather data and get insight into their tyre management and degradation patterns, which they used to inform their approach to the second half of the weekend with the break in parc ferme.

“Based on what we learned in the Sprint, we changed the set-up on both cars ahead of qualifying,” said Komatsu. “The positive there is it went in very much the right direction – both drivers were much happier with the car in qualifying.”

Ocon narrowly missed out on Q3, qualifying P11 with the belief that there was “still some performance to be gained from the car” while Bearman’s result was compromised by an operational mistake, putting him in P17.

Come the race and the degradation was much lower than every team had anticipated, opening the one-stop as an option as Lance Stroll’s first stint on the hard demonstrated the durability of this compound.

Bearman ran the alternate strategy, similarly to Stroll, starting on the hard tyre and moving to the medium on lap 27. He told F1TV post-race that at the time he didn’t know they were moving onto a one-stop. But this gave Bearman a compound and tyre life advantage compared to those around him, allowing him to pull off some switchback overtakes in the turn 14 hairpin, adding a “Ciao!” on the radio each time. With these moves and superior pace, he crossed the line in P10.

For Ocon, starting higher put him on the medium tyre to begin with, as was the move from the entire top 12 starters. Ocon moved off onto the hard on lap 12 and took this to the end which allowed him to move up to P7 by the flag as other midfielders opted for the two stopper, showing impressive pace as he did so.

The Frenchman called the result “valuable”, which could absolutely prove to be the case by the end of the year, especially as their midfield rivals lost out with an incorrect call for the two-stop. 

“We always knew there was going to be some more potential out of that car, but of course it’s a surprise to see how much this weekend. But we really changed 90% of the car from Friday to how it was on Saturday, and really in qualifying the car came alive and suddenly I felt just more confident and I felt that I could attack much more.”

“The car doesn’t feel 100% yet, which is a very good thing,” Ocon said post-race to F1TV.

And Komatsu agreed with this assessment: “I’m not kidding myself to say we’ve solved the problem – we haven’t.”

“So certain circuits we go to, we’re still gonna have a big problem – but, when we can operate the car in the way we want, thanks to the circuit characteristics, this is what we can do. We delivered today.”

The smoother surface coupled with the track layout allowed Haas to capitalise, and while they work on resolving their inherent issue with upgrades over the first phase of the year, capitalising when others can’t as they did today is exactly what could make the difference by the end of the year.

Things got even better for the squad post-race, as three disqualifications in the field for Hamilton, Leclerc and Gasly promoted Ocon up to P5 and Bearman to P8, meaning Haas now sit 6th in the team standings with 14 points on the board.