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Charles Leclerc blazed a trail that Ollie Bearman wants to follow. On the evidence of his second Formula 1 'debut', some traits he shares with Leclerc will help him get there.
It is hard not to draw parallels between the first Ferrari junior to get into F1 and the one succeeding him as Ferrari's next hot prospect. Especially when, at the scene of Leclerc's first grand statement of his abilities in F1 back in 2018, Bearman's just shown why Haas is so excited to get hold of him full-time in 2025.
Bearman has set an unusual record for scoring points with two different teams in his first two races, having followed up his Ferrari super-sub outing back in March in Saudi Arabia by making his race bow for Haas six months early in Azerbaijan.
The 19-year-old excelled as stand-in for Kevin Magnussen on the streets of Baku. He was quick throughout practice and recovered from a silly crash early in FP3 to outpace usual team leader Nico Hulkenberg convincingly in qualifying with a stunning lap on used tyres in Q2 that was faster than Hulkenberg managed on a new set.
And after being ordered to let Hulkenberg by in the race after over-managing his tyres in the first stint, which the team misjudged, Bearman's second stint was exceptionally good, included a good battle with Lewis Hamilton, and ended with Bearman taking advantage of the dramatic late Carlos Sainz/Sergio Perez crash to gain two positions and then mug Hulkenberg for the final point.
"Most of it was reaffirming the kind of things that we expected, but there's lots of confirmation," Haas team boss Ayao Komatsu tells The Race.
"Now that you're doing the whole weekend, the mindset is totally different. Each session's objective is totally different. How is he gonna deal with that?
"He did it almost perfectly, apart from FP3, but then he showed from that mistake how he's gonna bounce back quickly.
"So, there's lots of new information, but to be honest from what I've seen before, that's what I expected of him. But when I say that as expected, this is not taking anything away from him, because our expectation is so high."
It'd be easy to draw some lazy parallels with Leclerc - that Bearman's really fast, and he's also really self-critical - and leave it at that. And if we were to categorise the two main traits they share, it'd be 'mentality' and 'flair'. But there are so many parts to that, which seemed to come right out of the Leclerc playbook, that are worthy of elaboration.
Yes, the searing speed and the excessive self-flagellation were both evident in Baku. But that's just the surface. Look more closely and the unshakeable confidence between the walls is the same, the groove he gets in creates the same air of inevitability that this lap's going to be damn quick. The speed's raw and needs finessing - Bearman got his new-tyre run in Q2 slightly wrong - but so it was with Leclerc in the Sauber.
They even make similar errors. But more importantly, the mental resilience to recover from setbacks is also incredibly strong. He's self-critical without getting in his own head. Leclerc has punched in some outstanding 'OK, I'll just get right back on it then' moments after his own mistakes. He actually did that himself in Baku this year too - shunting in FP1, then taking pole the next day.
🔴 RED FLAG! 🔴
— Formula 1 (@F1) September 14, 2024
Ollie Bearman skates wide at the first corner and clatters the Haas into the barrier.
"I'm such an idiot." 📻#F1 #AzerbaijanGP pic.twitter.com/QZkVX2DssR
Bearman's crash came in FP3, which could have been more painful as it could have left him short of confidence right before qualifying. It definitely robbed him of some vital quali sims. But the only evidence of that was his slight misjudgement on his second Q2 run on softs, in which he made a small mistake in the middle sector and then finished the lap overdriving.
At least he had the wherewithal to recognise that - Bearman reckoned without his FP3 crash he'd have probably discovered the limit in that session and refined things for qualifying itself rather than learning on the go. But Haas really didn't care about that as much as Bearman did.
"Nico didn't go quicker than Ollie's [used] soft-tyre run, that's how quick he was," says Komatsu.
"And then on his new tyre run, before he made a mistake, he was half a second up. Half a second!
"This is probably Nico's weakest circuit. But to be able to do that, jumping in for the weekend with minimum notice, it's amazing."
The frustrated radio comments were very Leclerc, too. Back in his rookie season, Leclerc had a penchant for berating himself that was as obvious as his pace. He would go on to cement his status as one of the grid's chief self-critics after his move to Ferrari, most famously declaring "I am stupid" after a needless crash during an electric weekend in Baku in 2019.
Bearman's not in a Ferrari yet; OK, he's raced one, but he's not there full-time. He's already following in Leclerc's footsteps, though, repeatedly declaring himself an "idiot" during the Azerbaijan weekend, first with his FP3 crash and again when he failed to make it into Q3 in qualifying.
"It was the first time I experienced how he was going to react from the setback," says Komatsu, "which he's done perfectly.
"Even between Q1 and Q2, he was so calm. He got through then, bang, he focused. Q2 was impressive.
"And towards the end of the race, with an accident and it going to the yellow, he was very aware. As soon as it went to a green flag, he went for it. Nico didn't. It shows he's very calm, and he's got lots of capacity to absorb information and digest it.
"That's huge. That's what we saw in normal circumstances. But when he has a setback, when he has a difficult situation like in quali, like towards the end of the race, it shows that he can do that in a high pressure environment. It's great."
Bearman wasn't quite so enthusiastic about his performance as those around him because he knew even more was possible. He spent much of his inlap at the end of Q2 hitting the steering wheel, half-laughing at himself for missing Q3 by a fine margin - 0.128 seconds - after a mistake cost a much bigger chunk of time, and engaging in general beration.
It was similar in the race, as he aired his frustration at Haas's call to move aside for Hulkenberg, but later in the race admitted he was too slow himself. Komatsu says Haas needed to take the blame for that as it had the data from Hulkenberg's car to tell him he could push harder but Bearman, to his credit, is willing to assume responsibility.
"I wasn't fast enough at that point in the race and I was getting in the way of the strategy," says Bearman.
"At that point, Nico was by far the faster car, so it’s really my fault that I wasn't pushing hard enough.
"That really compromised my race, the fact that I was too slow in the first stint, because I got myself in some traffic for the second one."
As he attempted to navigate that traffic, it was interesting to hear Bearman vocalise his thought process as he caught and tried to pass Franco Colapinto's Williams. That was something different; of all the radio exchanges The Race has listened to and reported on over the last few seasons, a driver kind of coaching himself through a move ("He's slow - I just ned to time it well...") feels unique.
This is, all in all, a mix of things: vocalness, awareness, 'bouncebackability', and more. But you might file it all under that one thing: mentality. Leclerc's is extremely strong and Bearman's seems similarly robust. Just one of many tentative similarities we may draw: they both absorb information like sponges, they are both fantastically fast, they both deal with adversity well and they both seem to excel on outlier tracks.
That's the one thing you could say of Bearman, that Baku rewards confidence and good feeling more than perhaps any track, and the gaps between team-mates were particularly odd this year as the phenomenon was further exaggerated by how dirty the circuit was in place.
So, we don't yet have a reading of Bearman's proper performance level on a 'normal' circuit, and Haas doesn't either. But that's precisely because he's not an F1 driver yet. That'll come next year.
This was just a dress rehearsal - weekend zero of 2025, even though it wasn't with his confirmed engineering team, and some things will inevitably be different. Bearman had the mentality all weekend that this was a real bonus and wanted to make the most of his head start.
He felt there were a lot of lessons he can take into 2025, which Komatsu clearly cannot wait for: "I'm just so happy that he's racing with us next year."
