The day before Motorsport.com sidled into the back of Haas's garage at the 2024 Azerbaijan Grand Prix, Oliver Bearman had already made a point of getting to know all his mechanics working in this critical spot.
He’d gone around the whole Haas squad and said hello on Thursday – a new bundle of energy after the American team had gotten used to the laid-back unruffledness of two season pros in Kevin Magnussen and Nico Hulkenberg for the last two seasons.
His media duties then subsequently fulfilled, finally, the fun arrived the next day.
On Friday, having been allowed a comparative lie-in thanks to F1’s later schedule compared to the early Formula 2 sessions he’d otherwise have been contesting for Prema Racing, Bearman was ready to drive Magnussen’s VF-24.
We watch as he gets his helmet strapped on, takes in last words from his personal support team (Enzo Mucci and Jamie Smith) and climbs aboard. Experienced F1 race engineer Mark Slade runs him through switch and systems settings on the steering wheel, then it’s off for the first of three runs – two medium stints either side of a soft run.
In this session, he’ll finish 11th ahead of Hulkenberg, who endures a DRS problem without which there would’ve been a 0.4s gap – to the veteran’s advantage.
We can clearly hear more driver coaching going on from Magnussen’s engineering crew – Hulkenberg is digesting data himself when back in the garage and warns his team about possible floor damage, whereas for Bearman it is Slade spotting a pitot tube sensor data anomaly that has mechanics diving to check the right-rear diffuser.
But the main takeaway from listening in to Bearman’s radio for the heavily disrupted opening one-hour session is just how silent he is on the radio overall. Only urgent reporting “I have quite bad graining” on a long run late in the session betrays a hint of bother.
“That’s typical for rookies – they’re just absorbing so much,” explains Ed Brand, driver performance engineer (for both Haas cars) and team strategy engineer.
Motorsport.com decamps to Baku’s chandelier-heavy hotel conference room media centre for FP2, but Haas insiders later report that this silent sponge approach from Bearman carries on in the second Friday session. There, he finishes 10th - this time two spots but just 0.072s behind Hulkenberg.
Come Saturday, the paddock has woken up to surprisingly leaden skies. After squeezing our way past the many urban furniture obstacles this track is crammed against, we’re watching trackside for FP3. But we barely get a chance to assess Bearman’s approach to the Turn 4 tricky right-hander thanks to his weekend’s lowest moment.
Having “braked so late into Turn 1 even compared to much more competitive cars, like [Charles] Leclerc”, per Haas team boss Ayao Komatsu, Bearman was far too hot into the left-hander on his first push lap. He ran out of room to avoid smashing his left-front corner against the barrier. The team had warned him the track condition was “really poor” according to his future team boss.
The slow start to FP3 (thanks to its early drizzle) and Esteban Ocon’s first red-flag-causing stoppage all means Bearman doesn’t add to his two-lap total. This is much to the chagrin of Motorsport Images and dedicated Haas team photographer Simon Galloway, who’d moved back from his Turn 5 exit spot to allow a marshal room to pass and never saw Bearman come by again after he’d flashed by in the brief meantime.
Bearman’s Haas mechanics face a fast rebuild ahead of qualifying. But, having thanked the whole crew that got his car back to normal for that session, he then gives them a better reward. He outqualifies Hulkenberg – at a track the German driver detests – and comes within 0.128s of making Q3, albeit knocked out in 11th in Q2.
“He underperformed by three tenths – clear mistake [going deep at Turn 11 by Baku’s castle and having to catch a snap at Turn 12 too],” says hard-taskmaster Komatsu.
Bearman’s own annoyance comes across when he’s spotted slapping his steering wheel in frustration on his return to the pits. But Haas had been impressed with how he got back in the groove around Q1 yellow flags and how “the time he did on that used soft [in Q2 run one] is the same time as what Nico could do on new soft”, per Komatsu.
Afterwards, Bearman shares a handshake with Hulkenberg in the media mixed zone. Despite being temporary team-mates, and with Hulkenberg heading to Sauber/Audi for 2025, at least a little bond is said to have formed between the pair.
It was to Hulkenberg whom Bearman checked his later-than-dawn rising was normal for F1 drivers, while Motorsport.com understands they also shared plenty of jokes in a Baku fanzone visit on Saturday too.
The race is a wild affair for Bearman. Starting 10th thanks to Lewis Hamilton’s pitlane-start penalty, his stint one pace on the mediums is too slow and by lap 10 he’s asked to make way for Hulkenberg.
The problem is two-fold. He’ll later say, “I just lost a lot of time in the first stint just not driving very fast – I was just saving the tyres too much and that was not really necessary”. Komatsu is also frustrated Haas didn’t “communicate well enough [to say] that ‘that’s not a good enough pace and we need to do something different’”.
“But that’s on our side,” he adds.
For stint two, Bearman rises back towards the fringes of the top 10 where Hulkenberg is scrapping with the Williams pair – impressively holding off the marauding Hamilton for 23 laps.
The gap between them is “like a yo-yo quite a lot”, per Bearman, as they gradually edge towards Hulkenberg’s position between Alex Albon and Franco Colapinto – once the lead Williams has finally pitted and then passed the lead Haas.
Then, with 10 laps left, Hamilton “pounced” – again, according to Bearman. With a rapid DRS-assisted run down the long Baku main straight, Hamilton stays on the inside line.
Perhaps Bearman could’ve made sure to be on that piece of asphalt instead, but he nevertheless earned credit for judging his squeeze on the Mercedes and for trying to hang on around the outside.
Confident a seven-time world champion wouldn’t “put me in a wall”, he gives what he can until the inevitable happened and Hamilton is indeed flashing by on the exit of the scene of Bearman’s FP3 shunt.
His race seems set to end with a plucky 13th, but then several things combine in Bearman’s favour ahead.
First, Hulkenberg loses the three-second gap he was enjoying to Williams’s own temporary rookie Colapinto by clipping the wall approaching the tight, downhill Turn 15 left with three laps remaining. His pace fearing a puncture is costly and Hulkenberg is then jumped by Colapinto into Turn 3 on the next tour.
Then, in the aftermath of Sergio Perez and Carlos Sainz’s cack-handed collision, Hulkenberg strikes a piece of debris with the right-front he was already concerned about and, as he is “just completely flustered”, per Komatsu, doesn't react well enough to a green flag marker board being displayed ahead of Turn 3 seconds later.
Here, Hamilton shoots by, with Bearman having the nous to go with him. It is a critical move that secures his 10th-place finish and second stand-in points for the 2024 campaign after his Jeddah cameo in place of Sainz at Ferrari. “Definitely cool” is Bearman’s assessment of this achievement.
We head back down the rapidly deconstructing paddock to visit Haas one last time on Sunday evening with the sun setting on the shores of the Caspian Sea. Here, we find Komatsu: “Not perfect, but pretty impressive,” he concludes.
Speaking to other Haas team members across the weekend, it’s clear that Bearman has made an even greater impression off-track.
His quick learning and quiet, self-deprecating attitude have hit the right notes for a team that hasn’t enjoyed the sort of lofty glory of the squad where Bearman remains a junior, Ferrari. It is understood the Scuderia will be paying the Briton’s wages next year, while Haas is also benefitting from his media-training slickness gleamed in its Academy.
But it’s his attitude overall that seems to have gone down so well, so far, at Haas. ‘One of us already’ is the vibe.
