Haas F1 Team
Oliver Bearman, DNF
“After the VSC, I managed to get a good launch and good battery level, because I caught the two cars in front of me very quickly. It made Pierre go defensive into Turn 12, and at Turn 13, I sent one up the inside, and to be honest, he saw me as he left space but to me, it didn’t feel enough. He gave space, but only half a car's worth, and I was committed, so we made a bit of contact – I picked up a huge amount of damage on my car, and I probably damaged his car as well.
"It was a shame as I felt like I was massively penalised anyway, as the damage ruined my race, and on top of that I picked up the penalty. In my view, it was a racing incident. I sent a move and felt entitled to more space than I got, I didn’t lose control, and I had to climb up the kerb to try and avoid contact. I don’t regret going for the move because at this stage in the season, if we don’t do anything special and get a bit lucky and be aggressive and go for it, we’re just not going to score points as we’re not always fast enough to score them on merit.”
Esteban Ocon, 14th
“We had a mega start, we always do, we’re leading the stats on that. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve always gained two or three places at the start, and we did that once again in COTA. I’m proud that we’ve worked so well on that, and the pit stop went well as well, but on the second stint, we struggled to keep the other cars behind. The problems that we faced throughout the weekend came back, as I still had front-locking, and I still had quite a lot of understeer in high-speed. These inconsistencies are something that we really need to work on and understand, and we need to make sure we get rid of them in Mexico. The positive is that we did reduce it a little bit with setup, but that’s the maximum we can do with the current parts.”
Ayao Komatsu, Team Principal
“The race result was a shame, but I think there are lots of positives to take from this weekend. Both cars had great starts, and Ollie was fighting for P9 or P10, and without the damage he sustained, I think he had the speed to fight for that. We knew our race pace would be stronger than our quali pace. On Esteban’s side, he’s been fighting with front-locking issue, which got better, but towards the second half of the race, it came back and the pace wasn’t competitive. In terms of our operations, the fact that Ollie was happy from the get-go on lap 1, that’s exactly what we need. The fact that between Singapore and Austin, two very different circuits, we've unlocked performance – we’d like to build on that, and I hope we can fight hard in Mexico.”
