Oliver Bearman capped a roller-coaster opening day at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix with a standout performance under the Yas Marina floodlights, ending Friday’s second practice session an impressive fourth fastest – and feeling every bit as confident as the timing sheets suggested.
Running competitively in the evening session, the 20-year-old could barely contain his excitement over team radio, exclaiming: “Mate, the car is insane! I don’t know how it’s so good.”
Bearman’s Friday began with far less promise. A power loss early in FP1, later traced to a sensor issue, forced him to crawl back to the pits and sit out a chunk of the session. Even so, he managed a brief return on medium tyres before the gremlin resurfaced.
Despite the disruptions, Bearman said the underlying pace was clear from the outset.
“We had a good car underneath us already in FP1 – I had a great feeling. The first run was a bit understeery but you could feel deep down that the car was wanting to go fast,” he explained.
But the lost track time undeniably stung.
“In FP1, I didn’t get to do a lot of the session. We had a small issue on the car but I did one lap on the medium and we were really competitive.
'That’s really carried over to this afternoon but I think the key thing is it’s very tight out there,” Bearman said.
That competitiveness fully surfaced in FP2, where the Briton repeatedly punched in rapid laps on soft tyres, ultimately finishing just four-tenths off session leader Lando Norris.
With the midfield covered by mere tenths, Bearman stressed that the margins leave no room for error.
“We’re four tenths away but five tenths puts you outside the top 10, so it’s going to be really important to optimise everything for tomorrow.”
Running closely with proven one-lap specialists like George Russell only sharpened his appetite for a big Saturday.
A second top-five finish of the season – after his sensational P4 in Mexico – is firmly in play, and with Haas locked in a late-season scrap with Aston Martin for seventh in the Constructors’ Championship, every point is invaluable.
Given Friday’s pace, Bearman said the team may lean slightly more toward qualifying performance than usual.
“Yeah, it has been the case for us that generally we’re a bit stronger in the race than we are in qualifying. I think if we bias ourselves a bit towards Qualifying, it’s not going to be an issue regardless.”
For a driver who started his day stranded in the pits and ended it mixing it with the frontrunners, the transformation was striking – and judging by his grin afterward, Bearman knows he might be on the verge of something special this weekend.
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