Oliver Bearman says his crash in Free Practice 3 at the Monaco Grand Prix, after which he was eliminated in Q1, was the strangest in his nascent Formula 1 career.
The Haas driver lost control on a dusty part of the track coming into Massenet corner, careening into the guardrail and damaging the right-hand side of his VF-26.
“I just picked up the dust and lost it,” Bearman matter-of-factly recounted. “It was the strangest crash I ever had, it was so uncharacteristic of the car and everything that had happened that weekend.
“Suddenly I was facing the wrong way, it was super strange. Watching back, I just picked up a bit of dust. I was a bit more on the right avoiding the [Mercedes] car in traffic, and that's just one of the things about Monaco. But the guys did such a good job to get the car back together and it was feeling great in quali, so it’s a shame.”
The American team’s mechanics did successfully repair the car ahead of qualifying, but Bearman scored his worst result of the year in 19th after Gabriel Bortoleto crashed late on in Q1. This interrupted his quickest attempt, and he subsequently struggled on cold tyres on his last run, improving by only 0.09s and ending up 0.013s down on the Q2 cut-off time.
“The lap that I was on when it went yellow was enough, easily, to be in the top 10 at that stage of quali, which would easily have got us through into Q2,” the Briton pondered. “I really think we had what it takes to be fighting on the verge of Q3 today, and obviously qualifying is where it counts, so I'm really sad to be standing here [in the media pen while Q2 was under way].
“After the red flag, we queued for two and a half minutes, I had to do out-push [pushing on the out-lap] on a new set of tyres. Consider that for the rest of the weekend we've been doing out-prep, so my tyres were kind of 10C too cold, and I was sliding all over the place for the whole lap. Just not enough grip to put together a lap there at the end, but it's really a shame.”
This was when the TV broadcast showed Bearman experiencing a substantial slide in the high-speed swimming-pool section. “Just no grip,” he added as Motorsport brought up that particular moment.
“I was pushing 110%, giving it everything, because I knew I needed an ‘everything’ lap to get through, but really the grip was just nowhere. I was five tenths down on my best lap into the tunnel.
“Because I did my lap, obviously I had to back off with the yellow flag, and into the tunnel I was five tenths down, so I said ‘Okay, [either] I gain three tenths’ – which is what I needed – ‘or I'm not getting through’, so I gave it everything and it wasn't quite enough.”
