For six rounds, Haas looked like the team that had read the 2026 regulations best. Ollie Bearman took seventh in Australia and fifth in China, points came in five of the first six races, and the constructors' table had them fourth. Ten rounds in they sit seventh on 21 points, with four consecutive races outside the top ten.
Neither driver blames raw pace. They blame not knowing which car they will get.
"The biggest struggle I think has been the consistency of the car," Esteban Ocon said at the Hungaroring. "One time we had straight-line issues, one time downforce issues. The car hasn't been healthy all the time, let's say, and hasn't been performing like it should. That has hurt us performing well."
Asked whether a fresh chassis might help, Ocon pointed elsewhere.
"I don't think the chassis is the problem. We keep circling through parts. In Spa, we were lacking a lot of straight-line speed that came out of nowhere. We had a little bit of straight-line losses in Silverstone on Friday, but we fixed it for Saturday and Sunday."
His audit of the season is brutal in its arithmetic.
"Out of all the races we've done, only two have been normal in terms of car performance and car health. That's where we're struggling and we're working on it."
Bearman leads the intra-team score 18 points to three, so he had every reason to let the subject die. He didn't.
"It's a tough situation which is happening in our team," he said during the Thursday press conference in Budapest. "We've been speaking about it a lot, but the inconsistency between our parts has been quite high. I've been on the bad side of that, I've also been on the good side of that."
"All of that to say, it's not always a fair fight, the one that we are having. Sometimes we feel like we're fighting with our hands almost tied behind our back."
A driver undercutting the very comparison that flatters him is unusual — and it matters more for Bearman than most. His Ferrari connections run back to the academy and a debut stand-in at Jeddah in 2024, but with Charles Leclerc on a long-term deal and Lewis Hamilton rejuvenated by the new rules, there is no obvious seat waiting.
Motorsport Week's Anirban Aly Mandal framed the root cause as financial rather than aerodynamic: even under the cost cap, Haas cannot bolt on fixes at the rate of its rivals, and the upgrades it has run have failed to correlate with expectations. Seen that way, Ocon's session-to-session swings are what an under-resourced development programme looks like from the cockpit.
Bearman's own read is that the standings understate him.
"Of course, I feel like I'm performing at a really high level, and I really see a step in my performances from 12 months ago, even from the start of the season. That's all I can do, right?"
"At this stage, we're not in the fight for points, we're not in the fight to do a whole lot, other than try and get the most out of ourselves and learn as much as possible in this difficult period. It's been a challenge for us, I'm happy with what I'm doing, but the story is not necessarily what you see on the headline."
Ayao Komatsu had a rosier outlook when he spoke to Beyond The Grid in April, with Haas still fourth and Bearman seventh in the drivers' table.
"I haven't seen his limit yet," the team principal said. "He's got huge, huge potential."
On the prospect of Ferrari eventually taking him, Komatsu was unbothered.
"It's no point worrying about it. I'm a strong believer in controlling what you can control. Ferrari has been investing in him for many, many years. If we've done a great job with Ollie, and Ollie performed so well that Ferrari really wants to take him the following year, we have to be happy that we' ve done our job."
The problem now is that the list of things Haas can control has got shorter. The second half starts at Zandvoort on 21 August.