A set-up mistake by Haas in Friday’s second practice session left Oliver Bearman without useful car data before qualifying at Sepang, where he was eliminated in the first round. Team principal Ayao Komatsu acknowledged the team’s operational error, which Bearman said cost him reference information on his first visit to the circuit.

Bearman finished 16th in FP2, three-tenths of a second behind team-mate Esteban Ocon. He said the lost session left too little time to correct the problem in final practice. “Going into FP3 with just pretty much two push laps, you don’t have enough time to fix mistakes that we’ve done in previous days,” he said.

He said he entered qualifying uncertain about the car and his driving. “So that meant I went into quali basically like this and just guessing what to do with the car, with my driving and everything.” The unusually severe tyre wear compounded the lost preparation, he said, because each new set provided only one push lap.

Bearman explained that four push laps on new soft tyres before qualifying included the lap from FP2, which had produced no useful information. He said the two laps in FP3 were also largely spent trying to recover from the earlier mistake. “So we’re just very behind,” he said. He added: “That’s not our true pace, that’s not our true potential, but it’s really not far from it, if I’m honest.”

A lock-up on his second qualifying run further undermined his effort. Bearman said he locked the front-left tyre, on the outside front, into turn one, an unusual incident that he said could indicate a brake problem. “In my second run I locked the front-left which is the outside front into turn one, which is super-unusual and weird and usually tells you something’s up with the brakes so we need to look into that,” he said.

He said the lock-up reduced his confidence for his final run and left him believing he had not extracted all the available lap time. “So I came into my final run with a lack of confidence, I definitely left some lap time on the table.” Haas was due to investigate the possible brake issue, according to Bearman’s remarks.

Komatsu said the team’s mistake during FP2 prevented Bearman from gathering information, and that there was not enough time to make up for it in FP3 because the tyres lasted only one lap. He contrasted Sepang with Baku, where a driver could continue running and recover after a problem. “Unlike Baku, where you could keep running and recovering, it wasn’t the case here, so it goes to show that everything counts,” he said.

Komatsu said Haas had specific issues to examine despite the difficulty of the situation. “I’m confident that when we look into it and understand it, we can put a solution in place, like we have done every other time. It’s very tough, but that’s what we’ve got to focus on.” RaceFans reported the remarks on Oct. 3, 2026, at 11:29, in a report by Keith Collantine. Collantine founded RaceFans in 2005, when it was called F1 Fanatic, and began running the site full-time in 2010 after working as a motoring journalist.

Based on reporting by RaceFans.