How Silverstone played its part in Bearman’s learning curve

Let’s put this straight out there: the 2025 British Grand Prix, Oliver Bearman’s maiden appearance at Silverstone in the category atop the schedule, won’t be one he wants to remember in a hurry. After a curious blunder when FP3 was red-flagged and Bearman crashed at the pitlane entry, he was slapped with a 10-place grid drop by the stewards and raced from 18th to 11th in the changing conditions on race day.

The F2 years weren’t so fruitful either. Bearman’s finest hour before the British GP crowd remains his determined drive from sixth to third in the F3 feature race in 2022, seeing off Caio Collet and Isack Hadjar in the process.

Bearman rightly describes his experience at Silverstone last year as a major learning opportunity. His F1 career has generally proceeded along an improvement trajectory and the British GP triggered a change in approach that accelerated that development. He was beginning to develop a reputation for being error-prone, which was somewhat unfair, given the twitchy behaviour of last year’s Haas chassis.

In 2024 Bearman made his grand prix debut in the full glare of publicity, standing in for Carlos Sainz in the Saudi Arabian GP when the Ferrari driver had to have his appendix removed. He qualified 11th, missing Q3 by a matter of a few hundredths of a second, and finished seventh after a mature and flawless drive on one of the least forgiving circuits on the calendar.

That set a high bar of expectation when he was promoted to a full-time race seat with Haas, which has close technical ties with Ferrari. The assumption has always been that he is in a holding pattern as the Maranello team evaluates him as a candidate for when Lewis Hamilton retires.

The 2025 season was, therefore, a character-building one as the Haas car’s violent aversion to bumps took the whole team by surprise. After reaching the lower regions of the points in China, Japan and Bahrain, Bearman went nine straight grand prix weekends without scoring a point – hence his mental realignment over the summer break.

Silverstone 2025 was a weekend to forget after Bearman’s FP3 pitlane entry shunt

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Sutton Images via Getty Images

“After the summer break I tried to add a bit more structure to my weekends, how I go about the weekends,” he explained at the Abu Dhabi season finale. “Before the summer break, when we knew we were unlikely to even be able to get out of Q1, I spent the whole time focusing on how can I improve my driving, how can I improve the car set-up to find that half a tenth. Spending really no time thinking about where my head is at prior to getting in the car and setting goals for each session.

“Now I’m just making sure that half an hour before the session I stop working on the set-up and the driving and all of those things and focus on my mental side. I found that to be quite useful. In the first half of the season I finished P11 four or five races in a row [it was four], so it’s not like I was doing a terrible job. There was definitely a lack of consistency, but the only way of knowing what to do is by doing those mistakes.

“That’s the actual difference. There’s a lot of changes that I would have done, a lot of differences I would have made to what I did, but how can I do that without the knowledge of what works and what doesn’t?

“The kind of structure that I’ve added to my weekends has been really working. I feel like I’ve found some momentum and rhythm. I think rhythm is also a really powerful thing within this sport” Oliver Bearman

“The first half of the season is purely exploratory and has to be that way because you have to find what works for you and what doesn’t. F1 is a very different sport to what I’ve been doing the rest of my life. Definitely I would have changed things, but it’s not as easy as knowing. You have to do mistakes to learn from them and that’s really been the story of the season.

“That’s not to say that I’m a perfect and polished driver because I still have a lot to learn and I’m aware of that. But I think being aware of that is also very important. I feel like I’m in a good place. The kind of structure that I’ve added to my weekends has been really working. I feel like I’ve found some momentum and rhythm. I think rhythm is also a really powerful thing within this sport. It’s not just one thing that’s changed, it’s also a consequence of gaining experience.”

Six of Bearman’s nine points finishes in 2025 came from the Dutch GP onwards, including fourth in Mexico, where he entered the fight for the podium positions by slipping past the duelling Hamilton and Max Verstappen. It was opportunistic and a fine piece of racecraft.

Bearman celebrates after his determined drive from sixth to third in the F3 feature race at Silverstone in 2022

Photo by: Formula Motorsport Ltd

And while Bearman did have the benefit of an upgraded car – Haas held off for most of the year until applying an update at Austin in October – it wasn’t transformed overnight. Team-mate Esteban Ocon continued to struggle with random braking issues until the final round of the year.

Both Haas drivers are out of contract at the end of this season but indubitably Bearman has had the better of Ocon, particularly in qualifying. That poses interesting questions since, for Bearman at least, there is no immediate vacancy at Ferrari – and since he remains part of that squad’s set-up, his options are limited to teams with a prancing horse on the engine cover.

Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu has been guarded on the subject; asked about Bearman’s post-2026 destination during the Miami weekend, he responded: “Ask Fred [Vasseur, Ferrari team principal].” He was no less gnomic in Monaco when the question of his 2027 line-up arose again.

“I think it’s a lot depending on what other teams do as well,” he said. “You know, there’s obviously lots happening at this minute. So it’s not up to me to say when I want it decided because it’s really lots of moving parts. But yeah, around summer shutdown time, bit before, bit after. Really depending on what certain people do.”

For a manufacturer-supported driver, there must be an element of frustration at seeing those with similar backing enjoy more rapid promotion. Both Kimi Antonelli and Hadjar, Bearman’s junior-series rivals, enjoyed fast tracks to their works teams.

“I know that I have what it takes and also seeing someone like Kimi and even Isack – my age, my generation – performing at the front is kind of validating myself because I’ve raced with them in F4, F3, F2,” Bearman points out.

Bearman’s fifth-place finish in China has been his season high point so far

Photo by: Lars Baron / Getty Images

“But I’m not disappointed, I’m not sad. It’s part of my journey, I’m very much enjoying what I’m doing with Haas and I wouldn’t see staying with Haas in 2027 as a bad thing. I think it’s a great opportunity, the team is on a fantastic trajectory and I’m very much enjoying the journey that we’re on together.”

Haas came out of the box stronger this season but the VF-26 still has its quirks. The car’s aerodynamics require a stiff and relatively low-raked suspension platform, but this comes at a cost of driveability. Both drivers have struggled with locking brakes and a lack of willingness to turn into corners; the car’s general nervousness militates against them being able to attack corners aggressively.

Other midfielders struggled with overall downforce and driveability at the beginning of the season, but Alpine has been noticeably successful in adding performance through upgrades. Haas only added small parts here and there early on in the season before staging a bigger update for May’s Canadian GP, including a new floor with a more aggressive diffuser, revised bodywork, and new suspension geometry.

“I’m very much enjoying what I’m doing with Haas and I wouldn’t see staying with Haas in 2027 as a bad thing. I think it’s a great opportunity, the team is on a fantastic trajectory” Ollie Bearman

Adding new elements during a sprint weekend, where there’s only one practice session, is always fraught with peril and Haas ended up “chasing our tails” in Bearman’s words.

Again, it appeared that the upgraded aerodynamics’ theoretical performance was only reachable by running the car low and stiff, which made it highly averse to bumps. Bearman spoke of finding new problems now he could finally “lean on” the car.

“When we try and run the car in a way that’s good for driveability, then the entries become really challenging,” he explains. “And when we stiffen it up to make it better, it’s then impossible to find confidence. So we’re kind of balancing that knife edge.”

Montreal upgrade prompted a rethink following a Haas team sit-down

Photo by: Guido De Bortoli / LAT Images via Getty Images

Last season Haas managed to engineer its way out of a similar situation, though certain performance characteristics remained baked into the car. Komatsu reckons it can do so again.

“I said to my guys, it’s similar to, not as severe as last year’s Melbourne, but the same thing,” he says. “We have a setback at a certain point. Certain things, we find things, the car reacts in a certain way that we didn’t expect. And then the only way to solve it is to accept the problem, then align everyone, then understand, ‘OK, this is the issue we need to solve’, then just solve it.

“The reaction was really, really good. After Montreal, all the guys got together and then did a certain test we needed to do and then had a decent plan.”

After the Japanese GP, despite Bearman’s failure to finish after an accident induced by the current formula’s abstruse electrical deployment regime, Haas lay fourth in the constructors’ standings. Slipping back, as it has done since, was inevitable since the VF-26 certainly wasn’t, and isn’t, the fourth-fastest car on the grid.

But this is a team with ambitions to do better – and in Bearman it has a supremely gifted driver who is determined to prove himself.

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the August 2026 issue and subscribe today.

Bearman has had the edge over his more experienced team-mate Ocon

Photo by: Simon Galloway / LAT Images via Getty Images