Esteban Ocon hails “best quali of the year” as Haas hunts points in F1 Miami GP

Haas’ Esteban Ocon revelled in his passage to the final part of qualifying for Formula 1’s Miami Grand Prix, but noted that the American squad still had work to do to improve its VF-25 chassis’ consistency.

The Frenchman put his car ninth on the grid, outqualifying Red Bull’s Yuki Tsunoda’s and getting to within 0.07s of Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari, to ensure Haas could stake its claim for points after losing Oliver Bearman’s sprint-race eighth to a pitlane infringement.

Ocon paid credit to the Haas team for the changes it had made between the sprint race and qualifying, believing that it had “overcome most of the issues” that it had faced through Saturday’s shorter race.

He felt that there was little more that he could have done, having qualified within a second – 0.620s – of Verstappen’s pole lap.

“I think probably the best quali of the year so far for us. We really turned the car around in terms of set-up to try and improve from the issues that we had in the sprint race,” Ocon said.

“The sprint race was really a tricky one. We faced a lot of issues with the car and we overcame most of those. I’m still going to say there are some more that we need to overcome.

“But honestly, we maximised the potential we have, which definitely feels good. It’s a good relief for everyone because we’ve been through quite a lot of tough times lately in Jeddah. Also in the practice here, it hasn’t been easy.

“But this quali, nothing much more that we could have done.”

Set-up window “really small” for Haas team

Asked about Bearman’s run to the final grid slot, having failed to clear Q1, Ocon noted that Haas was still dealing with moments of inconsistency with its car, even when the two cars were running to the same set-up.

He explained that the range of finding the right set-up was still “really small” – but added that the team had fixes in the pipeline to address those issues.

“I think my engineering team did an awesome job. They can be proud of what we’ve done today,” he said. “But this is what we need to work on, our consistency. The window of our car is really, really small.

“And even though you try and put the cars together in the same set-up, we still see at times big differences across cars. We need to work on that, have more consistency out of it. But we have some plans coming into the next races.”

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