Oliver Bearman said Haas has been out-developed and overtaken by its rivals after the Austrian Grand Prix left the team seventh in the championship. The drop follows a strong start to the 2026 Formula 1 season, when Haas climbed to fourth in the standings after Australia and China.
Bearman on Haas pace
Bearman finished 14th in Spielberg and said Haas was the eighth-fastest car, a result that left him without points and well behind the pace he felt the car should have had. “Compared to the previous weekends it’s been a shame because you can stomach being what we were, which was the eighth-fastest car, on a weekend where you’re really unhappy with the balance and say, ‘Oh, yeah, you know, we were the eighth fastest, but we didn’t optimize everything,’” he said.
He added that the team had already squeezed what it could from the weekend before the result got worse. “Last week, we optimized everything, and we were eighth fastest, and that’s a really tough one to take.”
Bearman’s own comparison was even sharper. “Coming after the weekend in Spielberg, it’s a really tough one to take when you feel like you perform at a really high level. I felt like I was performing better than I’ve been in Austria [sic–Australia] or China where I scored a lot of points. And I was very far from the points. So that’s a tough pill to swallow.”
Haas falls back in Formula 1
Haas began the year in a strong midfield position, with Bearman seventh in Australia and fifth in China pushing the team up to fourth in the standings. Since then, Haas has added just a pair of 10th-place finishes and a ninth in Monaco scored by Esteban Ocon, before the Austrian Grand Prix turned into another setback.
Ocon finished 16th at the Austrian Grand Prix, and Bearman said the team has not matched the rate of development around it since round one. “I think we’re just a bit out of sync with the others,” he said. “I don’t think, you know, this is it. We have performance coming to the car and there’s been a few challenges.”
He was blunt about the update gap. “But this year so far up until this race, we’ve bought one real upgrade on the car and the others have done a lot more.”
VF-26 changes this weekend
Haas is bringing minor updates this weekend, and Ocon said the team will scan different parts again. “We are going to be scanning through different parts again this weekend,” he said.
He also pointed to a different specification at the rear and floor. “We have a different rear wing. We have a different floor. So we are looking for what the issue is.” Haas is not expecting a larger upgrade package for the VF-26 until after the summer recess, leaving the team to use the coming race weekend as a test of whether those smaller changes can close any of the gap that opened in Spielberg.
