The minor inconvenience Bearman will gladly face in his bid to emulate Leclerc

“It’s tough because I didn’t deliver a very good race and made a lot of mistakes. I made too many. It was definitely tough conditions, but I still wasn’t good enough…”

A Ferrari driver spoke those words after the recent Brazilian Grand Prix. And, for anyone thinking such relentless self-criticism must be the work of Scuderia superstar Charles Leclerc rather than team junior Ollie Bearman, the comparison between the two goes handily further.

Like Leclerc, Bearman is a product of the Ferrari Driver Academy. And also like Leclerc, he’s shown a searing turn of qualifying speed in both his substitute appearances for Haas this term, after he’d taken over Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari mid-way through the Jeddah round towards the start of the year.

In that appearance, where he finished a creditable seventh, Bearman became the 148th British driver to start a world championship grand prix. He will carry on that journey full-time with Haas in 2025, as part of a fully refreshed driver line-up for the American squad, alongside Esteban Ocon.

Bearman’s unassuming, self-deprecating nature has already gone down well with Haas insiders. And they were already very impressed by his free practice efforts at the 2023 Mexican GP. There, his immediate understanding of his assignment – to do well enough to help the team work through its weekend set-up checklist without trying too hard in showcasing his own abilities and so risking a shunt – went a long way to propelling him into consideration for the race seat he’s now secured.

Even so, the fact that Haas has been able to get to know Bearman well enough to start properly understanding his character is actually something of a problem. By stepping in when Kevin Magnussen was ruled out with sudden illness on the eve of the Brazil weekend – with such short notice that Bearman was awoken by a call to action from Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu at 6.30am on the first day of Interlagos track action – the 19-year-old has now started three F1 races.

Bearman's late call-up in Brazil means he has now started three Grands Prix, making him ineligible for the Abu Dhabi tyre test

Photo by: Lubomir Asenov / Motorsport Images

This means he will be unavailable to take part in the season-ending Abu Dhabi Pirelli tyre test, where rookies must be fielded in one car for each team, with a regular racer in the other. Haas is still deciding which rookie it will slot in alongside Esteban Ocon, who, unlike Ferrari-bound Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes, has been given permission from his current Alpine squad.

In theory, Bearman could still turn out at this event for Ferrari. But, speaking after he’d finished 12th in that wet and wild race at Interlagos last time out, Bearman was unbothered by the latest twist in his rapid rise to full-time F1 life.

“Racing, with other cars and stuff, is much more useful than a test,” he explains. “And [in Brazil] I got to learn the track, which I wasn’t going to be able to do without this race.”

"Doing a race in the wet is very rare in F1 so I need to make the most of all of them and take all of the laps. It was great experience" Oliver Bearman

After shining when he replaced Magnussen in Baku, on this occasion due to the Dane’s penalty points ban, Bearman’s Brazil weekend was rather more challenging.

He did show well against the clock in the dry sprint qualifying, where he made SQ3 and temporary team-mate Nico Hulkenberg failed. A mistake in the Senna S cost him any chance of improving upon 10th in that session, although Komatsu claimed that a “control box failure” that impacted his tyre warm-up when still in blankets back in the garage was behind the slide.

“He should have been fighting for P6,” Komatsu asserts of Bearman’s SQ3 appearance – a stage of qualifying he’d missed by just 0.13s back in Baku.

But that was really as good as it got at Interlagos. The sprint, which also took place in dry conditions, featured Bearman initially holding his ground before fading badly in the closing stages. Alex Albon, Hamilton, Franco Colapinto and Ocon tore past. His issue: severe tyre degradation.

Tyre degradation struggles led to Bearman dropping back in the sprint, but will prove an invaluable experience ahead of his first full season

Photo by: Lubomir Asenov / Motorsport Images

“At the end we were just lacking pace, so we’ve got a lot of work to do,” is Bearman’s assessment of that result. Hulkenberg, however, was also sliding down the order even before his gearbox problem put him out with five laps to go.

This suggests it wasn’t specific to Bearman’s driving, and evokes memories of Haas’s problem with race tyre management throughout 2023. Generally, this has been banished in 2024, and the ensuing wet weather in Brazil stopped the team from seeing how its subsequent adjustments would have transformed a dry GP distance at Interlagos.

And, while he can claim some comfort from Hulkenberg’s unforced error that led to his exit from the GP, Bearman’s travails in this race were also difficult. He tagged Colapinto in the opening phase and spun – a mistake compounded by a subsequent 10s penalty for causing the collision.

Afterwards, Bearman rallied to catch back up with and get past the Williams – a charge that included a bolshy pass on Hamilton. But he slid off solo at the restart after the first race stoppage, and later spun again while chasing Sainz, eventually beating only the two Saubers and an off-key Fernando Alonso.

“I feel a bit less confident in the car on inters,” he reflected. “Especially in high speed, the car is a bit less predictable, which is never a nice feeling in slippery conditions.”

Bearman was unafraid to voice his opinion on his penalty for the Colapinto clash, calling it “really harsh”. This does, however, miss the point made by Williams that the Argentinian was subsequently left dealing with diffuser damage.

“It was a crazy weekend, that’s for sure,” Bearman says of his overall experience in Brazil. “Especially, with the weather, with a different format [this was Bearman’s first time competing in a sprint weekend schedule], it’s been impressively strange. But you know, that’s good for me to learn new things. And doing a race in the wet is very rare in F1 so I need to make the most of all of them and take all of the laps. It was great experience.”

Like Leclerc when he made his F1 debut with Sauber in 2018, Bearman will retain his Ferrari links in 2025. His preparation has already included considerable time on the manufacturer’s simulator at its Maranello base, which Haas is hoping will provide a benefit when new partner Toyota gets its first such piece of kit up and running.

An eventful weekend in Brazil gave Bearman plenty of new experiences

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

“Ollie has been driving the Maranello simulator for our aero development as well,” Komatsu explained on the day Haas’s Toyota deal was announced. “So, to keep some consistency there, Ollie is keeping what he’s been doing, but is going to drive the simulator in Banbury as well.”

Looking back to 2016, when he was racing towards that year’s GP3 crown and Bearman was 11 and karting, Leclerc made four F1 practice appearances for Haas. Come 2025, in a tweak to the rules, it will be mandatory to field a rookie driver in four sessions, double the current requirement. But it will still be fewer than the six FP1 outings Haas had planned to put Bearman through in 2024 to assess his potential for a full-time drive, before circumstances meant it got to see what he could do in real racing scenarios anyway.

“People like Ollie and people like Colapinto, they’re doing great job right when they get into the Formula 1 car,” Komatsu says of this rule change. “So, I think it’s very important as an F1 community to make sure we provide that kind of opportunity for young drivers to drive F1 cars. I was all in favour of increasing the FP1s for young drivers.”

Avoiding any further tyre management dramas will be a must, but helpfully Haas is now well drilled in adopting a testing plan to iron out that exact issue

Boosting Bearman’s preparations for the 2025 campaign is Haas’s new Toyota deal meaning it will also be able to run its first Testing of Previous Cars (TPC) programme. He and Ocon will get two days in this from the newly created maximum of 20 permitted under the rules, with Haas’s plan understood to be starting from early 2025. After that, there will be just the 1.5 days for each driver of Bahrain pre-season testing in Haas’s 2025 challenger before the new campaign gets under way.

Avoiding any further tyre management dramas will be a must, but helpfully Haas is now well drilled in adopting a testing plan to iron out that exact issue. The team will also be just four years on from getting two rookies up to speed in the forms of Mick Schumacher and Nikita Mazepin back in 2021.

Their relations exploded swiftly that year, and Ocon also has quite a reputation for intra-team battling. How Bearman navigates that challenge will be a key theme to watch in his first full F1 season. But that is where his unexpected cameos will be of considerable benefit, as he seeks to emulate Leclerc in making himself the star of a Ferrari-powered team against well-established opposition.

Cameos for Bearman have given Komatsu and his team a much greater appreciation of the rookie's strengths

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Haas’s silver lining to Brazilian rain clouds

There were clear winners from Alpine’s shock double podium in the 2024 Brazilian GP. The Enstone squad and its publicity-hungry celebrity farmer neighbour, obviously, plus drivers Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly. But for Haas, its rival’s result meant being shuffled down from sixth in the constructors’ championship.

This was just when the American squad looked to have made a decisive shift in its year-long battle for that spot with RB, the team riding a breakthrough on its braking system that had elevated Kevin Magnussen to points-securing form alongside regular scorer Nico Hulkenberg in Mexico. Seventh would still bring a $30million prize money hike for Haas, which finished last in 2023. Alpine stands to gain the same sum if it can hold on to sixth to the end of this year, given its jump from the ninth place it had occupied since Baku in mid-September.

Before travelling to Brazil, Haas was on a run of five points-scoring finishes, while Alpine had taken just a single point from the same run. That provides handy motivation for what remains F1’s smallest squad but, even if it’s unsuccessful in regaining sixth position, Haas team boss Ayao Komatsu is already highlighting a positive amid its unpleasant Brazilian surprise: this is how good Ocon was in that treacherous race – one he led for 14 laps. In the short phase after early leaders George Russell and Lando Norris had pitted, he was even carving chunks out of eventual winner Max Verstappen.

“I never expected Alpine to score a double podium, but we always knew that anything can happen,” Komatsu said in Brazil. “In these kinds of chaotic races, anyone can score 15 points. I wasn’t expecting 33 points, but it happened. Congratulations to Alpine, their car was mega in wet conditions, so quick.

“If there is a positive, Esteban, our driver for next year, drove so well. So, I sent a message to congratulate him straight away. You have to respect your opposition – they did a great job, they had the correct car for these conditions.”

Ocon led for a time in Brazil after well-judged strategy gamble and finished a fine second

Photo by: Lubomir Asenov / Motorsport Images