Haas have had an up and down start to the season in 2025. Battling unexpected car issues that revealed themselves at the first race in Australia. Their performance has fluctuated over the first seven rounds of the championship with highs in China and Bahrain and lows in Saudi and Imola.

The Haas drivers themselves have had some wild swings in performance from race to race. Esteban Ocon and Ollie Bearman have by far the highest level of variation of all the driver parings in their qualifying results. At the moment , it seems when the car is working well for one of them it is very rarely in a good window for the other.

As of the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix the gap between the two drivers in a qualifying session has only been less than three tenths on one occasion (the Chinese Grand Prix main qualifying) and has been over half a second five times which is highly unusual for two drivers of their calibre (four times excluding Bearman’s deleted lap in Imola).

This has meant at times, one Haas driver has been right at the back of the grid while the other was comfortably into Q2, or even Q3. This was the case for Bearman in Japan, and arguably Ocon would have returned the favour at the very next race in Bahrain if not for his crash in Q2 while Bearman had been slowest of all in Q1.

Ocon gave a rather cryptic interview following his Q1 exit in Imola, citing major issues that robbed him of pace but declined to elaborate on these problems. Over the course of the season, both drivers have understandably skirted around any questions about the details of their struggles, Bearman often blaming a messy lap/session and Ocon occasionally mentioning setup differences.

It’s still unclear exactly what is causing these issues however they seem to be more of a factor in qualifying than the race. This is not unusual as any extreme traits of a car are typically dulled over a race distance.

With Monaco coming up, a track which demands high confidence in the car underneath you, and places a spotlight on any weak qualifying performances. It seems quite likely that we will see another rift in performance between the two drivers unless Haas can resolve some of the issues they have been facing.

Header Image by Lukas Raich, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons