Racing
© Jonathan Borba
Oliver Bearman will start the Monaco Grand Prix only 19th after a Saturday that swung from a heavy FP3 crash to a Q1 exit he and Haas believe hid genuine top-10 pace.
The Haas driver said the decisive moment in qualifying came before Gabriel Bortoleto's late Q1 crash stopped the session. Bearman believed the lap he was on was already good enough to get him through comfortably. “On the lap that I was on when it went yellow, it was enough, easily, to be in the top 10 at that stage of quali,” he said. “I really think we had what it takes to be fighting on the verge of Q3 today.” Instead, he ended the session 19th, just 0.013s shy of the Q2 cut-off.
That made the result even harder to accept after Haas had rebuilt his VF-26 following his FP3 accident at Massenet. Bearman lost control after moving off line in traffic, hit the barriers and caused a red flag that lasted roughly seven to eight minutes, with the car suffering significant rear and right-hand-side damage.
Bearman, speaking after qualifying, called it “the strangest crash I’ve ever had.” He said he “just picked up the dust and lost it,” adding that the moment was “so uncharacteristic of the car” after the way Haas had performed through the weekend. “I was a bit more on the right, avoiding a car in traffic,” he said. “Suddenly I was facing the wrong way.”
The team got the car back out, and Bearman said it felt strong enough to recover the day in qualifying. But the red flag interruption left him with only one shot at the end of Q1, and he said the tyre preparation that had worked all weekend was no longer possible.
“After the red flag, we queued for two and a half minutes,” he said. “I had to do out-push on a new set of tyres. Consider that for the rest of the weekend we've been doing out-prep, so my tyres were kind of 10C too cold.” Bearman said he was “sliding all over the place for the whole lap” and improved by only 0.09s on his final attempt.
He said the lack of grip defined that last run. “I was pushing 110%, giving it everything, because I knew I needed an everything lap to get through,” he said. “But really, the grip was just nowhere.” He was five tenths down on his best lap by the tunnel and could not recover enough time to escape Q1.
Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu said the outcome did not reflect the car's pace. He called the result “pretty deflating and a tough one to take,” and said Haas had the speed to get “one car into Q3.” Komatsu added that Bearman had been “three and a half tenths quicker” than Liam Lawson before the red flag, underlining how costly the interruption was at a circuit where, as he put it, qualifying is “everything.”
That leaves Bearman facing Monaco from near the back in what he called a “really unlucky day,” while Haas is left to wonder what might have been after showing pace that should have put its repaired car much further up the grid.