Oliver Bearman has lamented the fact that he had to skip Free Practice 1 at the Mexico Grand Prix owing to Formula 1’s sporting regulations.
Teams are mandated to run rookies in each car on two occasions this season on grand prix weekends, with such drivers defined as having not taken more than two grand prix starts.
As it happens, Bearman partook in three races last year, standing in for Carlos Sainz at Ferrari and Kevin Magnussen at Haas – meaning he narrowly failed to be eligible for the rookie status this season, as far as FP1 running is concerned.
Nine out of 10 teams opted to replace one of their regular drivers at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, due to a number of factors – having few to no upgrades to test at this stage of the season, the track being quite dusty early on, and the high-downforce set-up being quite straightforward due to the low air density.
Bearman ceded his car to Haas reserve driver Ryo Hirakawa, but had only driven on the Mexico circuit once previously (in FP1 for Haas in 2023) and therefore felt hard done by.
“It's a tough track, and I probably underestimated how important it is to even do FP1,” the 20-year-old Briton said. “So again, it's tough. It's my rookie season, but I'm still having to miss FP1. In my position, I should be able to do FP1 in a weekend like this, but the fact is that I have to give it up.
“You have to give them up, so anyway it's going to hurt you regardless of where you do it. If I was to repeat the season, I'd probably do it in tracks that I know a lot more, like Abu Dhabi and stuff like that.
“But the facts are that I'm still a rookie, this is my first full season, and I'm still having to give up FP1s. I shouldn't even be in this situation where I'm having to give up FP1s.”
With hindsight, Bearman even wishes he hadn’t got that third F1 race opportunity in 2024: “I guess those three races I got last year, where I am now, I probably would have only done two races to get an FP1 this weekend, and maybe we could have been a little bit faster today.”
Based on his comments, one might think Bearman struggled in qualifying – but far from it. The English youngster outqualified experienced team-mate Esteban Ocon for the sixth consecutive time, outpacing him by 0.050s to reach Q3.
“I'm happy to be in Q3, all things considered,” Bearman said. “Yesterday I was struggling a bit to get on top of the car in just one session, and today I had a bit of an issue on my soft tyre that meant I didn't really get a feeling on it. So heading into quali there were a lot of question marks.
“We're still missing a bit, because that lap that I did there in Q3, honestly, was I felt like all that she could do, so that's a bit of a bittersweet feeling. But we're in Q3 for the third time in a row and the upgrade is definitely more performance to the car, which is what we aim for, so that's important,” he added, referring to the floor upgrade that debuted on the VF-25 in Austin.
Bearman will start the race from ninth thanks to Carlos Sainz’s five-place grid penalty and is confident he can make even more progress, having had “a really good race pace” in Free Practice 2.
“The set-up direction we took is always focusing a bit more on the race than it is on quali,” he explained. “So we're having to live with a slightly more difficult car in quali to have good race pace, and that has worked recently in recent races – and I think it will work again tomorrow.”
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