- Bearman struggled in F1 rookie season with a problem nobody had addressed.
- A 90-10 media-to-engineering split left him little time to prep at new circuits.
- A 10-minute pre-session check-in turned his second half of the season around.
Oliver Bearman had everything a Formula 1 rookie could want. A seat, a team, and a calendar full of races. What he did not have was time to think.
The British Haas driver turned 20 during the 2025 season, his first full year in Formula 1. By the midpoint of the year, a difficult stretch of results had forced an honest conversation with the people around him about how he was approaching his race weekends.
What came out of that conversation was not a technical fix. It was 10 minutes.
From Formula 2 to Formula 1: a complete reversal of priorities
To understand why those 10 minutes mattered, you first have to understand what had been taken away from him.
In Formula 2, a Thursday at the track belonged mostly to the driver and the engineers.
Bearman described the split plainly during an appearance on the Up To Speed podcast, hosted by Naomi Schiff and Jolie Sharpe.
Roughly 90% of his time went toward setup discussions, strategy work and technical preparation. Media commitments filled the rest.
Formula 1 turned that ratio on its head.
“Now in F1 it’s the other way around,” Bearman said on the podcast.
“It’s 90% interviews, media, filming. The team loves to do TikToks, which is great, really enjoyable. And 10% with the engineers, which is tough, especially as a rookie going to new tracks, experiencing new things every time.”
For a veteran driver, years of muscle memory and reference data fill the gaps. For Bearman, there were no gaps to fill. Everything was new, and he barely had time to prepare.
“If I get an hour with the engineers on Thursday, I consider it a good Thursday,” he said.
The danger of having no time for yourself
The problem was not only about preparation. It was about what state of mind Bearman arrived in when he finally climbed into the car.
A Formula 1 driver entering a session carries everything with them. Every conversation, every distraction, every unfinished thought.
When the schedule offers no pause between the noise and the cockpit, the noise comes too.
Bearman described it honestly. Even on days he drove, the margin for quiet reflection was almost zero.
He was moving constantly, from one commitment to the next, with no moment to settle, reset or ask himself what he actually wanted to do once the visor came down.
That lack of internal space accumulated over the first half of the season. A bad weekend at the Hungarian Grand Prix, where he ran wide in Turn 4 during first practice and damaged the car’s floor, brought things to a head.
He sat down with his mental coach for a conversation that cut straight to the point.
“We sat down, and we were like ‘look, this isn’t going to work, you’ll be packing your bags if you continue driving like this,'” Bearman had said last year.
The summer break and the honest self-assessment
The summer break gave Bearman something the calendar had not: time to sit still and think.
He gathered the people closest to him. His driver coach, his mental coach, his manager. Together, they looked at how his weekends were structured and asked a direct question.
“We spend all of this time thinking about the strategy and the setup, all of the car things,” Bearman said on the podcast. “And I don’t spend any time thinking about myself.”
Their solution was deliberately small. No sweeping changes, no new systems. Just one protected window before each session.
“I would basically just spend 10 minutes to calm down, get in the zone a little bit and talk about what I’m planning to do for the session,” Bearman explained. “All of the plans were set out in stone. And then I would kind of get in the car and be like, ‘OK, what’s my target for the session?'”
That was it. Ten minutes was all he needed to get his rookie season back on track.
The results that followed
The second half of Bearman’s season looked like a different driver had taken the wheel.
Six of his nine points finishes in 2025 came after the summer break. He finished fourth in Mexico City, spending much of the race in a wheel-to-wheel battle with Max Verstappen.
From Singapore to Las Vegas, he scored points in five straight Grand Prix weekends, the first Haas driver in the team’s history to do so, collecting 25 points across that run.
It is worth noting that Haas also brought a significant upgrade to Austin.
The team revised the floor geometry, rear corners and sidepod inlets of the VF-25 for the United States Grand Prix, and Bearman acknowledged that the hardware improvement contributed to the upturn.
But the qualifying numbers tell a story that upgrades alone cannot explain. At the halfway point of the year, his more experienced teammate Esteban Ocon led their head-to-head qualifying battle 8-6.
By season’s end, Bearman had outqualified Ocon on 14 occasions. He reached eighth on the grid at both Austin and Sao Paulo, career-best results in qualifying.
He finished the season 13th in the drivers’ championship with 41 points, three ahead of Ocon.
Bearman ended the 2025 season on a high and has since continued his form. He has scored all but one point for Haas in 2026. 17 compared to a single point for Esteban Ocon.
In a sport measured in thousandths of a second, Bearman discovered that 10 minutes might be the most valuable investment a driver can make.
