One of the most important influences on F1 driver weekends is the role that race engineers play.
After completing a four-year stint at Alpine, Esteban Ocon is tying a bond with a brand new race engineer who switched to HAAS for its 2025 campaign.
Ocon is working with Laura Mueller. Laura Mueller became F1’s first female race engineer earlier this year. This is a promotion that reflects the steady change in sports to become more inclusive.
They enjoy a history-making partnership along the way in their first season and Ocon.
“We’re totally speeding up ‘yes’,” Ocon told crash.net in an exclusive interview with Silverstone. “Laura works very hard, I work hard with her and make sure she’s as optimized as possible throughout the weekend.
“It was great to work with her. On my side of the garage, Laura is leading a lot of people. I have Sacha (Fouquet), a young performance engineer coming from F2, and a microphone (Dawkins) doing all the mapping and more.
“We can always do well, but looking at how we took the opportunity these days, it was really amazing. When we had the opportunity to take it with us in the car, we seized all the opportunities there were.
Mueller’s decisive personality and hardworking nature made her an ideal teammate for Ocon.
Ocon and Mueller are already forming a strong partnership
“She doesn’t count the hours,” explains the Frenchman. “She’s really interested in details like I do. I sometimes get to double check things up for tiny little details.
“That’s not that I don’t trust people. I just want to understand myself why we made these decisions. There’s no hidden gem. If we think that’s impossible, we’ll say that.
“If Laura thinks I can improve this particular thing, she’ll tell me. If she thinks she can improve that particular thing, I’ll tell her. We’re on the same boat so we need to move forward.
“It’s very strong and very good, but it’s a long season so you have to look after each other all year round. Staying healthy and high energy is very important.
“For example, I didn’t feel good in Austria, so I think Laura feels bad. We made sure she had the right vitamins and stuff so she could spend the weekend.
“It can happen with these double headers and you can meet so many people and things like that. It’s good to play once, but you have to play 24 times. That’s a big thing.”
Suitable for new homes, cars and engines
Besides building new relationships with Haas’s technical team, Ocon is adapting to a new environment. In just six months in American outfit, he already feels completely home.
“It feels good,” he said. “We are still working on something very important to us, but we learn about the car every weekend and work on small details every time we go out and it works really well for the whole team.
“I’m very mounted on the whole team and the ideas and motivations they have. It’s all very easy for racing. There’s only one idea behind it. You get more performance from the car, fix the issues and respond to the situation.
“I’ve never found it on every team. I can tell you, that’s a very good thing, because there’s not all politics more than real sports.
The Ocon had to adapt to the new car, the Haas’ VF-25 Challenger. The recent updates have helped to fix some of the early bedding issues Ocon faced.
Ocon recorded the best results in China, fifth place
“I worked to find out where the problem lies, and now I hope that with that new update, I will move in the direction of development I discovered earlier this year,” he explained.
“So, I hope that everything we’ve worked on will benefit us from this, so I look forward to seeing if it helps us.”
The Ocon is one of several drivers going through the adaptation process this year, when switching teams in the winter.
On paper, it appears to have gone smoothly for Ocon, who sits in 10th place in the championship, which won 23 of Haas’s 29 points in 2025.
“It certainly wasn’t easy. There was a lot of new things to learn when I joined this team,” he said. “I think we did a really good job trying to make every scenario, every detail, big ones pretty quickly, not to see. Then we worked on small things.
“The reason it’s still difficult is because the car hasn’t been developed by me. I still found some limitations at this moment on some things that I’m not satisfied with.
“So now we have a package that we especially want to go in the right direction to fix the small balance issues I have. The team is really good at responding to this.”
Ocon also had to adapt to the Ferrari power units previously driven by Mercedes and Renault engines.
“Overall, we all have the same tools, but we just sorted them out differently,” Ocon replied when asked about the challenge of grasping a new power unit.
“Some things are very good. Some things are very different, but overall it was a big step in the right direction for me.
“It’s not my way, so I don’t criticise others, but I found that I’m very pleased with what makes it easy to get on the team and do the job right away.”