Haas only had one upgraded Ferrari engine to give away this weekend, and it did not go to Esteban Ocon. That honour belongs to Oliver Bearman, leaving the Frenchman to race Monza with old power in a shiny new body.
Ferrari is rolling out the second evaluation version of its ADUO power unit at the Italian Grand Prix, but only one has been made available to Haas. Rather than split hairs or find some diplomatic middle ground, the American team has simply handed it to Bearman. Ocon gets the new aerodynamic package but not the engine to go with it, and he is remarkably matter of fact about being the one left holding the older spec.
Ocon Confirms the Snub Himself
There was no attempt to dress this up. Ocon laid it out plainly when discussing his weekend outlook.
“I’m not going to have the full updated package. I mean, I have the car on the aero side. I will not have the ADUO2. We’ll have this one because we have only one. That’s the reason. So I’m going to be driving with the old engine. So that’s going to be quite some loss. But the updated car, I will have it. So we’ll see what we get.” – Esteban Ocon
“Quite some loss” is a generous way of putting it. Handing your new-spec engine to one driver and not the other is the kind of call that team principals normally try to obscure behind vague language about “optimising resources.” Haas, or at least Ocon, isn’t bothering with the spin. He said it, straight, to Motorsport.com.
Why Bearman and Not Ocon
Haas has not offered a public explanation for why Bearman gets first dibs on the new engine, and neither has Oliver Bearman been asked to justify it. The pecking order, though, is not exactly a mystery. Bearman sits above Ocon in the drivers’ championship with 18 points to Ocon’s 3, and he has looked the sharper of the two Haas drivers for most of the season. Give a team boss one shiny toy and one driver clearly outperforming the other, and you don’t need a psychology degree to guess who gets it.
Regulations state that engine manufacturers must supply customer teams with power units of identical specification. Ferrari, and by extension the FIA, appears to have found the loophole: as long as one qualifying engine exists somewhere in the team’s garage, the letter of the rule is satisfied even if half the grid’s Haas cars don’t actually have it. Convenient, isn’t it, that the rule designed to guarantee fairness between team-mates has a gap wide enough for exactly this scenario to slip through.
The Aero Gains Everyone Gets, Just Not at Monza
Both cars will run Haas’ new aerodynamic package this weekend, which team principal Ayao Komatsu has already confirmed publicly. Ocon, at least, sounds genuinely enthused about that part of the package, even if the engine situation has taken some shine off it.
“I’m excited to drive this new car. Obviously, we have the new aero package. I drove it in the simulator on Tuesday, and it felt better there. Of course, we need to translate it to the track, you know. It’s not always a given that it will perform like that on track.” – Esteban Ocon
He’s also managing expectations about where the gains will actually show up. Monza’s long straights and light-downforce demands are hardly the ideal proving ground for a package built to find grip through corners.
“Everybody’s excited in the office and looking forward to see what this car can do. Obviously, it’s not the most technical circuit for it. So we are not going to see the full gain. We are more going to see that in Madrid. But it will still be interesting to see how the car feels in the Lesmos and Parabolica compared to before.” – Esteban Ocon
A Season That Has Gone Distinctly Flat
Context matters here, and Haas’ context is grim reading. The team has not scored a point since Monaco, a run that has coincided with the rest of the midfield finding upgrades faster than Haas could produce them. Ocon put it down to a simple failure to keep pace with development.
“We started the year well in terms of pace. And the others developed a bit faster than us. And we were waiting for that package. So hopefully this will deliver what we hope. Hopefully it will put us closer to the top 10 positions. And then we can fight hopefully with the VCARBs and the Alpines again.” – Esteban Ocon
That’s a fair summary of where Haas sits right now: 21 points, seventh in the constructors’ table, sandwiched between teams it should be scrapping with rather than watching disappear up the road. Both Racing Bulls and Alpine have pulled clear, and Haas needs this upgrade to actually work if it wants to close that gap before the season runs out.
Ocon’s Frustration Is Not New
There’s a wearier subtext running through Ocon’s comments too. He believes he has already been getting more out of the current car than its raw pace deserves, which makes the sting of missing out on the engine sharper rather than softer.
“I feel like we’ve maximised the potential of the car. It was a shame to think like, that’s the best we could have done and not have much reward. So I hope that now if we do that, we have something different as a reward.” – Esteban Ocon
It’s a reasonable position. A driver who’s already squeezing every tenth out of an uncompetitive car is entitled to feel aggrieved when the upgrade that might actually change his weekend goes to the garage next door instead. Haas may well argue this is simply a temporary supply issue that resolves itself once Ferrari produces more units, and that may be true. But for now, the optics are unambiguous: one engine, one favourite, and Ocon left to make do with what’s left over.
Practice for the Italian Grand Prix gets underway on Friday, 4 September, with FP1 at 10:30 UTC, check the calendar for your local time. Qualifying follows on Saturday at 14:00 UTC, with the race on Sunday at 13:00 UTC. Whatever the aero package does for Ocon’s confidence, the engine gap will still be sitting there on the data sheet, and it isn’t going away this weekend.
