Ocon takes stock at halftime: "What needs to improve is consistency"

(Motorsport-Total.com) - In the first half of the 2025 Formula 1 season, Esteban Ocon repeatedly took home a bucketful of points for his Haas team. His most successful result was a fifth-place finish in Shanghai in the second race. However, this was offset by some total failures, such as 16th place in Spain and 15th place in Belgium.

Precisely because Sauber and Aston Martin had been overtaking Haas in the last few races, Ocon had set his sights high for the last Grand Prix before the summer break in Hungary. But qualifying already pointed the way the race would go. In the end, he finished 16th again, leaving him with the feeling that hardly any strategy would have made the hoped-for difference on this day:

"The last ten or fifteen laps were difficult. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough pace to keep the others behind us. Especially in the final corner, we lacked the speed to defend ourselves," explains the Frenchman. "It was a difficult race, one to forget."

No strategy in the world would have smoothed Hungary over

Strategically, Ocon said, there was little that could have been salvaged: "I don't think any strategy would have really worked. In the end, it was more of a struggle, and I was more concerned with defending than attacking. From my point of view, nothing would have changed in the order."

Despite the sobering result, the Frenchman draws a positive half-time conclusion: "I scored quite a few points in the first half of the season. "If you look at where we were in the first race, that's positive," said Ocon, who is still in tenth place in the drivers' standings with his points haul.

However, due to the tight midfield, including Oliver Bearman's eight points, Haas is only in ninth place in the Constructors' Championship with 35 points. (Click here for the Formula 1 Constructors' Championship)

Waiting for a possible update

Ocon sees the problem in the lack of consistency and the missed opportunity to get the most out of the car every race. "I'd say it worked out 50 percent of the time, but we need to take a closer look at the other 50 percent."

After the summer break, Ocon hopes for a boost from a planned upgrade: "The team doesn't stop pushing, and that's good." The Frenchman links his confidence in his team to a good memory from the 2024 season. "We saw how good the 'Austin update' was for Kevin [Magnussen] and Nico [Hülkenberg] last year. Hopefully, that will be the case for us this time too."

The new components aren't set in stone yet, though. While the update is in development, Haas has to keep a tight budget at this late stage. "We traditionally try to deliver a package for this race. It's late in the season, but if you divide the development into race-related phases, it fits into our cycle," says Deputy Chief Engineer Jonathan Heal, for example.

A weakness has already been identified

However, before the update on the US Grand Prix in Austin, Texas, possibly approaches, Ocon and Bearman still have four more races to contest after the summer break. And they'll use that time to calmly analyze the first half. The Haas driver sees an obvious weakness in the qualifying performance: "We simply have to do a better job there."

The statistics prove him right. In exactly half of the 14 qualifying sessions so far, the Frenchman has been eliminated in Q1. Only twice (Miami and Monaco) has Ocon managed to place his car in the top 10. ( Click here for the Formula 1 database )