Despite a promising start to the weekend, Oliver Bearman, who made his third appearance in Formula One as a replacement for the ill Kevin Magnussen, ultimately came away from the 2024 São Paulo Grand Prix disappointed after finishing P12.
While speaking after the race, Bearman described the experience as “tough” and admitted that he had “made a lot of mistakes.”
He had trips through the grass, glanced his front wing after spinning at turn 7, and the PREMA driver in F2 also picked up a 10-second penalty for contact with Franco Colapinto.
“Yeah, it’s tough because I didn’t deliver a good race and made a lot of mistakes.”
However, the 19-year-old acknowledged that the tricky weather conditions had contributed to his underperformance, claiming that other drivers, including those more experienced than him, had made a significant number of mistakes.
“But if you look at the grid and the amount of people that actually finished the race first of all, and the amount of people that did zero mistakes was very low.”
While Bearman remained self-critical, emphasising that he had made “too many mistakes” during the race, he added that a lack of confidence in the car while using the intermediate tyres (‘inters’), especially in high-speed sectors, had also contributed to his disappointing performance.
“Of course, to be the best and get to score points today, I needed to stay on track the whole time, and unfortunately, I didn’t do that, I made too many mistakes.
“So, it’s definitely tough conditions, but I still wasn’t good enough today.
“Yeah, I feel a bit less confident in the car, especially in high speed, the car is a bit less predictable, which is never a nice feeling in these slippery conditions.
“I think everyone has similar issues and it’s tough to really say where we stand on wet, because it’s sometimes a bit less about the car and a bit more about the whole package.
“But yeah, it was definitely a tough one today.”
Bearman also addressed the penalty headed to him after his collision with Williams Racing’s Franco Colapinto.
The Briton described the penalty as “harsh” as while Colapinto had not been affected by the incident, Bearman had lost time.
“Yeah, I thought that was a bit harsh. I mean, I hit him, he didn’t even feel me, I hardly touched him, nothing happened to him.
“I lost 10 seconds and then I got a 10-second penalty for losing 10 seconds, so it was really harsh on me.”
While Bearman could not definitively say what had caused the incident, he admitted that he had been struggling with front locking throughout the day.
This, he claimed, had been a major contributor to the mistakes that he made both during qualifying and in the race.
“Yeah, I don’t know, but front locking was an issue all of the day. Even in qualifying it was quite a limitation and it’s really tough to get confidence in the car when the front tyres seem to lock at a tiny bit more brake pressure so this is really difficult to manage and difficult to get confidence in the car.
“A lot of my mistakes today came to front locking.
“Once you lock the tyre it’s really game over, you’re out of the track.”
Bearman, who learned that he would be replacing Magnussen only hours before Friday’s practice session, was asked for his thoughts on his first F1 Sprint weekend.
He described the weekend as being “crazy” but stated that it had been a good opportunity for him to gain experience with the different format and different weather conditions.
“It’s been a crazy weekend, that’s for sure, especially today with the weather, with the different formats.
“It’s been impressively strange, but that’s good for me to learn new things and doing a race in the wet is very rare in F1, so I need to make the most of all of them and take all of the laps.
“It’s a great experience.”
Bearman, who after three races in F1 is no longer eligible to participate in the young driver post-season testing, also claimed that his experiences during the races, and especially, the São Paulo Grand Prix, were more “useful than participation in post-season testing.
“Yes, exactly, racing in a race with other cars is much more useful than a test.
“I got to learn the track which I wasn’t going to be able to do without this race, and racing under these conditions is always tough and I definitely learned a lot.”
