Ferrari’s transparency and openness with providing engine information to its customer Formula 1 teams has been praised by Haas driver Ollie Bearman.
Question marks have been raised about Mercedes’ treatment of its customer teams after both McLaren and Williams admitted to being caught off guard by the vast performance gap between themselves and their supplier.
Mercedes dominated the season-opening Australian Grand Prix as George Russell led home team-mate Andrea Kimi Antonelli, while reigning world champion Lando Norris finished 51 seconds adrift in a distant fifth place.
After the race, McLaren team principal Andrea Stella revealed his discontent at a lack of “information” being provided by Mercedes about its new 2026 engine. Williams boss James Vowles echoed Stella’s comments as he raised similar question marks about Mercedes.
In contrast, Ferrari’s customer teams Haas and Cadillac appear to have no concerns.
“I must say that Ferrari has been incredibly open and incredibly helpful with us in terms of the deployment strategy and giving us as much info as they can to help us. I think it’s a different situation that we have with Ferrari relative to McLaren and Mercedes,” Bearman said in response to a question from Crash.net.
“They’ve been incredibly helpful, but of course there’s a bigger difference between our cars. They’re almost a session ahead of us in terms of their quali. Their FP3 time was our quali time almost, if that makes sense.
“As the lap time goes up, the demands of energy change a lot. The amount of lift-and-coast, the gear usage, all of these things you have to pre-empt and have a look towards qualifying for. A corner might be flat out for them or a corner might be a lift for them, whereas it’s a brake for us or a downshift. Then we need to adjust it in our own way.
“Australia, we went in and figured it out as we were going. Now, having done that weekend, we have two or three points. We expect to be slower in these corners, maybe we’re geared down in these corners. Also, when you’re slower at apexes, obviously you have to deploy more power as well on the exit. It’s all a big knock-on effect. That’s useful to know and info to bring forward for the future races.”
Asked if Haas knows where the delta was with Ferrari and could adjust accordingly, Bearman replied: “I think so. We gained info already in Australia. Turn 5 was an example where Ferrari were flat from the beginning, just looking at their GPS speed, whereas for us it wasn’t flat until the end of FP2 or even FP3.
“In terms of strategy, you have to change the way that you approach things. Now, just looking at the track, as an engineering group, we identify some corners where we expect to see some differences, then take that forward into the race. That info is good to have.”
