Oliver Bearman has described a slump in his 2025 performance that left him fearing for his seat with the Haas Formula 1 team, admitting that it was "packing your bags" territory if the mistakes continued.
The Briton's rookie campaign was overall very impressive, with him finishing three points ahead of his experienced team-mate Esteban Ocon in 13th place. But despite this, the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend was a struggle for the young Briton, who spiralled in Budapest.
Running wide in Turn 4 during FP1, he damaged the floor of his Haas, necessitating repairs that put him on the back foot for FP2. In FP3, he hit the floor once again in the same place, and this bad luck followed him in the grand prix, where floor damage at the rear of his car forced him to retire despite a strong push in the opening lap.
"I just had this mindset," he told the High Performance podcast. "I'm not scoring points as this is going. I need to push a bit more. Keep pushing a bit more. Keep going. Keep going.
"These small errors kept creeping in and I did another one in the race and damaged the car again. And we had to retire and that was the worst possible end to the first half of the year.
"That was already a challenging point for me because, whatever I was doing, I was P11, and then I tried to give it that little bit more - that 1% more and it finished like that. And basically, I just left the circuit with question marks everywhere - it's not going to plan. This is not how I intended to finish my first half of the season. I'm not seeing any progression here, and it's just challenging.”
This slump forced an uncomfortable conversation with his mental coach that pushed him to confront his performance.
"I had to have a really tough conversation with myself and a tough conversation with my mental coach. At that point, I was last in the championship as well, of all the drivers who have scored points. So there were people below me, but they'd scored zero points.
"We sat down and we were like 'look, this isn't going to work, you'll be packing your bags if you continue driving like this and making these [mistakes].'"
The British Grand Prix saw the driver suffer a 10-place grid penalty after a red flag infringement during FP3 caused by his car spinning as he entered the pitlane. Despite this, he finished in an impressive 11th position - two places ahead of Ocon.
"Because F1 is cutthroat, and I had four or five races where it just wasn't working. I had this stupid Silverstone thing. I had this weekend in Budapest and you don't see progression, you know?
"So, the people deciding my future don't see improvement, and what do you do when you don't see improvement? You get rid."
The summer break was a turning point for him as he used it to reassess his mindset and come back stronger.
"I was like, 'OK, I really need to tie my shoes up and get this together.' And that tough conversation really woke me up and made me understand, first of all, how cutthroat this sport is and second of all, how with a small change at the end, I didn't need to flip my world upside down.
"I just needed a bit of structure and then I could perform at a level which was much higher.”
