Bearman's 'Worst Car Ever' Lays Bare Haas And Williams Slump

Barcelona is the circuit that flatters nobody. Its long, loaded corners punish any car short of downforce, and on Sunday it dragged two of the midfield's proudest names - Haas and Williams - to the floor, while the grid's newest team quietly kept climbing.

For Oliver Bearman, the weekend hit bottom on Saturday morning. After final practice he described the Haas as "the worst car I've ever driven in my life," a verdict that captured how narrow the car's usable window has become. The Race's analysis backed him up, pointing to a fundamental weakness in how usable the downforce is - instability on entry that turns to understeer mid-corner, and a knife-edge balance that, when it tips, leaves the driver nowhere to go. Bearman dragged the car into the points fight before yet another retirement ended his afternoon.

The frustration ran up to the pit wall. Team principal Ayao Komatsu was openly critical of how Haas executed the weekend, blaming poor operations and a lack of pace rather than bad luck. As the breakdown channel LawVS put it, Komatsu "didn't mince his words" - and Haas now finds itself defending seventh in the constructors' standings from Williams rather than chasing the cars ahead.

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Williams arrived expecting trouble at a track that exposes an overweight, underdeveloped car, and tyre degradation did the damage. "Everyone's degging, we're just degging two times more," Carlos Sainz said, summing up a car that slides, overheats its rubber and pays for it twice over. Sainz nursed his to 12th and refused to dress it up: at a track like this, he said, "you finish where the car deserves to finish." Alex Albon's afternoon was wrecked by a loose onboard camera that triggered an automatic investigation and cost him 11 laps - bad luck piled on top of a bad weekend.

Not everyone read it the same way. Reviewing the race, Formula Duck admitted Williams had become impossible to predict - strong one weekend, "just bad" the next - and questioned how long Esteban Ocon can survive at Haas with Bearman regularly ahead of him. LawVS was kinder to the drivers than the machinery, judging Bearman to be "punching above the car's weight."

The mood was very different at Cadillac. The grid's newcomer ran within a couple of seconds of the front in Q1 and finished clear of Aston Martin, with Sergio Perez the dependable one. The car still has a hard limit - its pace falls off a cliff once a stint runs past about 15 laps, which forced a three-stop - but Perez framed it as progress. "Every finish is data," he said, with upgrades promised for Austria. The Race agreed the worst of Cadillac's early-season downforce deficit has been eradicated.

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For Haas and Williams, Barcelona was a reality check that upgrades alone have not answered. For Cadillac, it was another step up off the floor. The next read comes in a week, at the Red Bull Ring.

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*Originally published on [Formula 1 News](https://newsformula.one/article/bearmans-worst-car-ever-lays-bare-haas-and-williams-slump). Visit for full coverage.*

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