Haas rookie Ollie Bearman enjoyed his scrap with Lewis Hamilton in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, even if he lost out to the Mercedes driver in the closing stages of the race.
For his second race in Formula 1, his first with Haas, which he owed to Kevin Magnussen’s one-race ban, Bearman was able once again to put a point on the board, although circumstances awarded him a lucky break.
The 19-year-old launched his race from tenth on the grid thanks to Hamilton’s decision to start his afternoon from the pitlane. But the seven-time world champion caught up with his young rival after the pair’s early pitstops.
Nevertheless, Bearman was able to hold his advantage of the Mercedes until lap 40 of 51, when Hamilton lunged down the inside of the Briton at Baku’s Turn 1, completing the pass as they entered the tight Turn 2 left-hander.
“You know when you go around the outside that he’s going to leave you space, which is a nice feeling,” Bearman said as he reflected on Hamilton’s maneuver.
“Like in Turn 1, I knew that he wasn’t going to put me in a wall, which is a bit less sure with some other drivers. That’s a nice feeling and it’s always very clean but hard when I was racing him.”
Bearman said that during the laps that preceded Hamilton’s move, he had pushed hard to bridge the gap with fellow rookie Franco Colapinto up ahead, perhaps soliciting a bit too much his tyres in the process.
“I was really pushing hard for some laps to overtake Franco and my tyres were getting really hot,” added Haas' 2025 driver. “It was exactly at that point that he pounced on me and could overtake me quite easily.
“After that, I needed a few laps and I caught him back up and was almost catching the DRS again. It’s annoying that I let him overtake but you can’t make little mistakes with a guy like that behind.”
On the penultimate lap of the event, Carlos Sainz and Sergio Perez’s pain following their spectacular run-in was Hamilton and Bearman’s gains, with the pair instantly bumped up two spots in the standings, and into the points.
But the commotion from the crash also allowed te duo to overtake an over-prudent Nico Hulkenberg who intently slowed after passing the crash site, fearing that he had picked up some debris.
“It went green again and I managed to get him with Lewis,” Bearman explained.
“It was an overtake. I’m sorry for him. He had a problem to lose the position also to Franco, but I’m happy to take the point.”
Looking back on his afternoon, Bearman reckoned that he had perhaps been too conservative in his approach to tyre management in the first part of the race.
“It was a tough race. I wasn’t running in the points until the end because of the crash in front,” he explained.
“The car was really fast and, in all honesty, I was really fast as well, I just lost a lot of time in the first stint just not driving very fast. I was just saving the tyres too much and that was not really necessary.
“I took too much of the experience from FP2 into the race but the track is so different in the race that you can almost forget the long runs from FP2 and start again. I put that down to experience.”
Beyond Bearman's impressive efforts in Baku, and taking into account his seventh place finish with Ferrari in Jeddah earlier this year, F1 historians will remember the Briton became on Sunday the first F1 driver to score points with two different teams in his first two races in Formula 1!
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