The usual caveats applied when it came to Haas' pre-season testing pace - or so it seemed at the time. After it spent last year's Formula 1 test in Bahrain doing nothing except running at full fuel loads to quell its greedy streak with tyres, Haas rocked up in the opening race with a good level of pace and had ensconced itself in the midfield fight over sixth in the championship.
It was assumed that the same had come to play this year. At no point did the car ever rise off the bottom of the timing boards; Esteban Ocon and Oliver Bearman spent three days diligently logging the laps with the anticipation that the performance would come when fuel was taken out in Australia.
Instead, it hasn't worked out like that - and the lack of performance a week ago on Friday rather blindsided the team. Team principal Ayao Komatsu genuinely believed something was broken when the car did its first laps around the Melbourne circuit, and it was of palpable disappointment that there was nothing physically wrong with it.
Aerodynamically, however, there's a few problems with the VF-25. Komatsu cited the main weakness as being in the high-speed corners which, in Bahrain, was not exposed due to the paucity of high-load turns around the circuit. Melbourne ended up being the first indication of the new car's woes, and the team immediately had to turn to set-up work to mitigate the situation.
"It was a big surprise," Komatsu revealed. "We weren't expecting that whatsoever based on Bahrain testing. Yes, in Bahrain testing the car wasn't perfect, but we weren't expecting near as bad as Melbourne. But in FP1, the very first lap when the car went out, I thought either something was broken or something's completely out of the ballpark. Then when we established nothing's broken, and we've got a big issue.
"It was pretty clear the problem was in high speed, Turn 9, Turn 10, so we just worked and worked to make those corners better with the expense of low speed.
"Even then our low speed corners are okay, not great, but compared to the issue we had in Turn 9-10, it's night and day. So then by Q1, we managed to get Turn 9 more or less respectable. It's actually fine. But Turn 10, still nowhere. We understand why, but with the issues we have, we cannot solve it for all corners."
For a few weeks, if not months, the team's bases will resemble seminal medical drama House more than Haas - it has a list of symptoms, and now must expose its car to a series of painful tests in order to diagnose the underlying cause. Komatsu has played down the notion of a quick fix, but he has also played down the idea that the team will just accept its fate and divert its resources straight into 2026. He believes that there's still something to fight for, and the knowledge gained in the process is worth the grief.
"We have understanding what the issue is," he added. The next point is to understand which part of the car we need to modify, or which part of the car has the sensitivity to solve this performance issue. Next is, how are we going to find a solution? Then that, some of them can be reasonably short-term solution, but some of them will be an iterative process, both in CFD and wind tunnel. So you're not going to see a solution for some races. It's pretty severe."
When it comes to the technical aspect of F1, we tend to analyse trends and quickly understand why things work. Very rarely do we get a full explanation of why something hasn't worked; engineers tend to hide in the nebulous statement of "lack of balance" and keep the rest of the details obscured. Not so here, as Komatsu treated the media attending his Thursday session to a full dynamic analysis of how the car was responding - particularly in Turn 10 - and why this was not conducive to a good result in Australia.
The main issue appears to be the VF-25 at low ride heights. Running the car low, or "on the deck", raises the performance ceiling of the car as the Venturi tunnels underneath are much less exposed to external airflow entering the underbody and the acceleration of airflow underneath improves suction. The problem here is that, due to the suspension compression and effect of the aerodynamics underneath, this can bottom out without the damping to compensate for it. In other words, Haas is suffering from the dreaded mid-corner bouncing.
"We put performance on the car over the winter. Then of course you do simulator work, you do simulations, but these are fine," Komatsu says. "But Turn 10 seriously just completely exposed [the weakness]. It's got the deep compression in the middle of the corner as well. But again, Turn 9 to Turn 10 transition, it's just nowhere. But that's a dynamic issue. Then it's aerodynamic issue. So at least we understood that much.
"But it's both combination of aerodynamic oscillation and then our rear downforce characteristics. If you only had one of them, you can live with it. But when you superimpose those problems on top of each other, basically it just becomes very difficult to drive. So in essence, through Turn 10, the downforce, let's say driver can extract - it's probably same as what we had in Melbourne '24. Even though potentially the performance we have on the car at that speed is so much higher, you can't extract it because it's just not usable. So again, that's what we need to address."
Komatsu says that setting up the car to get more out of Turn 9, the left-hander at the end of Melbourne's Lakeside Drive, at least offered indications that the team could explore set-up options to help it in the interim, and will throw everything at Shanghai's sole practice session to gather further data in similar corners - Turns 7 and 8 being perhaps the closest thing the Chinese circuit has to an out-and-out high-speed corner.
But the team boss added that Haas's current woes were partly expected; having seen other teams run aground with its development over 2024 and having to reverse floor designs to overcome mid-corner bouncing, he now believes that the American squad is going to experience the same growing pains.
"I've been saying this inside for the last nine months. Even in the middle of the VF-24 development, we've been putting good development on the car. But at some point, we're going to drive into this issue. Because if big teams, capable teams like Ferrari, Mercedes, Red Bull, everybody at some point driving into this issue, for sure, we will face the same issue again.
"So we have to be ready for it. So that's what I was saying. But then it's difficult in the sense that to be ready for it because you don't know what mechanism you are missing to create this problem.
"And now this problem happened, then when you're really looking through the steps and the iterations between the end of season VF-24 to VF-25, there is some clue where we started pushing certain things too much to create this kind of issue.
"Ferrari, when they had that issue, they didn't have that level of understanding. And through whatever many weeks and months, I'm sure their tools and understanding exponentially grew. So that's why they're not making the same mistake this year. Unfortunately, we have to go through that ourselves. It's not something we can shortcut."
Ferrari did manage to reverse that scenario, when its Barcelona floor started to induce mid-corner bouncing at high-speed. It took a few rounds to implement a fix, starting with a new floor in Hungary that eventually started to bear fruit over the second half of the season. Haas will pursue its own development to alleviate the symptoms, having accounted for development over 2025 before fully switching to 2026; although Komatsu doesn't wish to put a timeframe upon it, he hopes that he can steer the ship through choppy waters in good time to truly join the midfield battle in 2025.
