Why both Haas drivers are getting Monza aero upgrades – but only Bearman has a new PU

The Italian Grand Prix is a big weekend for Haas as the team brings its first major upgrade package since Canada back in May.

The VF-26 has slipped towards the tail of the midfield pack in recent races, having been jumped by Aston Martin’s AMR26. There’s also been a rollercoaster of form between Ollie Bearman and Esteban Ocon, with typically one struggling and the other a lot happier on a given weekend.

For Monza there’s also an extra boost for Bearman, who gets the sole example of the latest Ferrari power unit – upgraded through the ADUO process – that has been allocated to customer team Haas.

“We are very much hoping that we have a bit more performance this weekend,” Bearman said on Thursday. “It’s been a good few races now that we’ve kind of been left behind by our competition. It’s been a while that we’ve brought a big upgrade to the car, and so we have a lot of hopes set on this one.

“It seems like a big one, and all of the team are quite confident. Monza, it’s maybe not the best place to bring upgrades necessarily, because you don’t see the full effect of the benefit, of course, with this track, which is a much more drag-sensitive one than maybe last week was.

“Nonetheless, it’s been a long time coming. The team have worked incredibly hard, and we have a lot of challenges that we face. Being a small team, one of them is the turnaround times of our upgrades, and you’ve seen that. The last big one that we brought was in Canada, which is a long way back. Hopefully it’s going to be a good weekend for us.”

Ocon, who had a few difficult races in the middle of the season, is equally upbeat about the upgrades.

“I'm excited to drive this new car,” said the Frenchman. “Obviously, we have the new aero package. I drove it in the simulator on Tuesday, and yeah, it felt better there. Of course, we need to translate it to the track. It's not always a given that it will perform like that on track.

“But everybody's excited in the office, and looking forward to see what this car can do. And 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. So it is quite a big package, and I'm looking forward to driving it.”

Ocon’s suggestion that it’s a “new car” gives some idea of the scale of the upgrade package, and that’s backed up by the strategy that the team has adopted for the weekend.

In the past it has often conducted back-to-back tests between new and old spec cars on Friday, and then converted the latter for Saturday.

This time both cars are in the new spec from the start of FP1, a reflection of the fact that changing on Friday evening would be a huge job – and likely involve playing a curfew joker.

“Ideally, we want to back-to-back it,” said Team Principal Ayao Komatsu. “But because of the parts involved, it's very difficult to back-to-back, like to combat the car on Friday night, for instance, that was going to be challenging. One to break the curfew, two, in terms of quality of the job we can do.

“Yes, it's nice to actually measure exactly how much performance you put on the car, but at the same time we don't want to risk that Friday night s**t fight. But also, let's face it, if we had a car capable of scoring points at the baseline, we might take a different view.

“But if we don't do anything, we're not going to score points. So we rather put it all in, believe that it's going to work, and then make sure that we do a very good quality preparation.”

As mentioned earlier only Bearman has the new Ferrari power unit this weekend, and why he and not Ocon has the benefit of it is an interesting tale in itself, given that usually Haas try to be as fair as possible across the two cars.

Ferrari is only obliged to provide its customer teams with one upgraded power unit when the works cars get a new spec. In essence given the need to squeeze out everything possible at Monza, Haas did not want to wait until two were available just to be fair to both drivers. Thus the difficult choice was made to give only one car the benefit.

“Last time around we didn't do that,” Komatsu confirmed. “We waited until we had enough engines to introduce to both drivers together. Obviously Monza, as you know, it's a very power-sensitive circuit. So it's a shame to have performance sitting in the garage, right?

“Of course, it makes it very challenging. So yes, it would have been better if two engines are available at least. But again, Ferrari is pushing like hell to get as much performance on the engine as possible. Of course, they want to introduce it at Monza, for the reasons I just said to you. So that means they’ve got minimum quantity, just to satisfy the regulation.”

So why did Bearman get the nod? He’s ahead of Ocon in the World Championship, but that wasn’t the only factor at play.

“Of course, that's part of the consideration,” said Komatsu. “But again, it's not an aerodynamic upgrade, but the last items we had, like the CI [Carbon Industrie] brakes test, Esteban was actually struggling more on brake locking, etcetera. So considering that the Montreal upgrade, we got it on Ollie first, we decided to give that brake upgrade to Esteban first.

“We had another upgrade on the power steering before shutdown in Budapest. Again, we decided to give that to Esteban, because again he was more vocal about it, and he was struggling more on the power steering feel. So the last two upgrades we gave to Esteban – this this time around it's a back to Ollie.”