04/05/2025
NEWS STORY
MoneyGram Haas F1 Team finished with Esteban Ocon 12th, while Oliver Bearman was forced into retirement, at the Miami Grand Prix, held Sunday at the Miami International Autodrome.
Ocon started from ninth position on Pirelli P Zero Yellow medium tires but lost out on the opening lap, dropping to 10th place. Ocon put in a fine defensive effort to protect the final points paying position against Lewis Hamilton, but was eventually overhauled by the seven-time world champion, dropping to 11th spot. Ocon came into the pits on lap 23 for White hard tires and preserved that set through the remainder of the race to finish in 12th.
Bearman took the start from 19th position on hard tires and made up several positions on the opening lap to run in 16th place, and embarked on a battle with Alpine's Pierre Gasly. Unfortunately for Bearman his VF-25 suffered a power unit issue on lap 28 and he was forced to retire from the race.
MoneyGram Haas F1 Team holds sixth position in the Constructors' Championship on 20 points.
Ollie Bearman: "It was going okay but I spent a good chunk of time in a DRS train, which obviously wasn't ideal for the tires. I think we had some pace but not enough to be in the points. We need to review what happened, I lost drive, and it's unfortunate that we weren't able to finish the race. I take away the positive that our pace and performance in the Sprint was competitive, and we move on to the next."
Esteban Ocon: "It was a solid race on our side but unfortunately, we lacked a bit of pace to be fighting with the quicker guys in front. We didn't get very lucky as we didn't pit under VSC, had a couple of fights but they always ended the same way, so that was a bit frustrating. I think overall it's been a strong weekend from the team and we need to keep that going once we find a bit more performance in the car. We'll keep at it, there are some good learnings from this weekend, and some good expectations for the upcoming races, so I'm looking forward to it."
Ayao Komatsu, Team Principal: "Today's been quite a tough race. With Ollie starting from P20, we tried to go forwards as much as possible but we had a PU failure, so that was the end of his race. Esteban's first stint was okay - he was fighting against Hamilton pretty well and held him back for as long as he did, so he drove well - but we didn't get our pit stop timing correct so we got undercut by Hadjar. That ruined it as in the second stint we couldn't overtake him, which killed the tires. I think because of Tsunoda's penalty, we could've had P10 and that's the really disappointing thing, but we need to learn from it. This weekend, sometimes we really nailed it; like in Q2 with Esteban, but Q1 and Q3 wasn't great. There's plenty of things that we need to understand, today's race pace and decision making because the pit stop didn't work, so we need to learn as a team and then put it right in Imola."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Miami here.