Bearman Calls Haas Pace at Silverstone Painful

• Ollie Bearman called Haas “not quick enough” at his home Grand Prix and described the team’s lack of pace as “painful”
• The Briton was spun around at Brooklands on the opening lap after contact with Alex Albon, who was handed a 10-second penalty
• Bearman recovered to finish twelfth while team mate Esteban Ocon crossed the line in thirteenth after a slow pit stop

Ollie Bearman says Haas were “not quick enough” at his home Grand Prix, calling the team’s lack of pace at Silverstone “painful.”

The Briton started Sunday’s 52-lap race from P13 but was knocked into a spin at Brooklands on the opening lap after contact with Alex Albon’s Williams. Albon was handed a 10-second penalty for the incident, while Bearman spent the rest of the afternoon recovering positions before he was eventually classified twelfth.

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Starts Keep Costing Him Ground

Bearman pointed to a pattern that has followed him through recent race weekends: strong pace undone by poor getaways. He had qualified thirteenth for the race, one place further back than his Sprint grid slot, and admitted the team has not found consistency at the lights.

“We’ve been having some issues of getting consistency on the starts,” Bearman said. “Yesterday was a good start, today was terrible again and I just went backwards and that put us in a position to get spun around into Brooklands.”

That reference to “yesterday” was Saturday’s Sprint, where Bearman had made a clean getaway. Sunday’s race told a different story from the first corner, and the contact with Albon at Brooklands left him at the back of the field before the race had properly begun.

A Long Way Back Through the Field

Recovering from the back of the pack at Silverstone is never easy, and Bearman found the Haas simply lacked the speed to make progress once he was running in traffic.

“After that I was running at the back and then after that, we were just slow, we were not quick enough to overtake,” he explained. “Struggled a lot in the dirty air and then I managed to have a bit of clean air and show some good pace, but still, not quick enough. It’s painful.”

The word choice was deliberate. Bearman has been open in recent weeks about the gap between Haas and the midfield teams above them, and Sunday’s result, a lone point-less finish at his home race, deepened that frustration.

A Home Race That Means More

Silverstone marked only the second home race of Bearman’s Formula 1 career, and the 21-year-old had made clear before the weekend how much the occasion meant to him. Speaking on the Thursday media day, he described it as the highlight of his year, with family in attendance and a crowd he believes is worth real lap time.

“As an event this is for me the highlight with my family coming, and the home crowd which will hopefully give me three tenths, that’s apparently what Nigel Mansell used to say,” Bearman said. “I’m excited, and I always find a bit more energy for this one. It’s a busy one but it’s such a cool event and always special to race at home.”

He was realistic about the team’s chances heading into the weekend, pointing back to Austria as a guide. “We came off the back of Spielberg where on my side I really felt I performed well, but we were the eighth-fastest car,” he said. Bearman also pointed to Haas driver Nico Hulkenberg’s wet-weather podium at Silverstone last year as proof that a difficult weekend can still turn on its head, adding that the team should “always keep our head up and give it everything” as chances like that are part of what Formula 1 is about.

A Season Still Searching for Pace

Haas arrive at the midpoint of the calendar with 21 points to their name, a tally built largely on early scoring rather than sustained pace. Bearman opened the year strongly with a seventh-place finish at the Australian Grand Prix, and he recovered from a nervy opening lap in China to cross the line fifth, with Ocon adding to the tally in Japan. Results of that kind have become harder to find as the season has worn on.

Bearman had already been candid about the reasons for that slide days before Silverstone. “Being brutally honest, we’ve just been out-developed by our competitors and we haven’t brought as many upgrades and significant upgrades as they have,” he said. “So I’m not surprised to be standing here being overtaken by Alpine, Racing Bulls and Audi. In Austria we were with Williams. It shows we need to continue working hard and we need to put a bit more performance on the car.”

He added that Haas had a small update planned for the British Grand Prix that he hoped would help, saying the team needed to “knuckle down and work hard” to close the gap on the rivals who had out-developed them. Sunday’s result at Silverstone, a spin at the first corner followed by a pointless afternoon, was not the response he had been hoping to deliver.

No Upgrades on the Horizon

Looking ahead to the Belgian and Hungarian Grands Prix, the two races that close out the run before the summer break, Bearman does not expect things to change quickly. Haas has no major upgrade package planned before the break in August.

“We haven’t got a whole lot on the horizon unfortunately, so it’s going to be a tough two races before the summer break,” he added.

That leaves Haas leaning on race management and strategy calls to find points over the next fortnight rather than any fresh performance from the car itself.

Ocon Takes the Positives

Team mate Esteban Ocon finished directly behind Bearman in thirteenth, having pitted under a brief virtual safety car that lasted only a matter of seconds while an umbrella was retrieved from the track. His own pit stop was slow, costing him further time, but Ocon left Silverstone with a more encouraging assessment of the car than his team mate.

“Not quite the perfect race let’s say but we had a car that was performing normally, without big issues, I didn’t have the degradation problem that I had for many races,” Ocon said. He credited the mechanics and engineers for a car that had “really improved” over the last three or four races, adding: “The car is healthy and I could fight, so it was nice.”

He continued: “I enjoyed driving that race and being there and able to fight without some kind of issues that we faced. That was fun but obviously we need a bit more pace to get closer to the points.”

The two drivers leave Silverstone with contrasting takes on the same weekend. Bearman’s spin and recovery drive left him focused on what went wrong, while Ocon found reassurance in a car that behaved itself even without the pace to reach the points. Both agree the next two races, run back to back before the summer break, will be a test of what Haas can extract from a package that is not about to change. For Bearman, a home race that meant more to him than most on the calendar ended with little to show for it beyond the lessons he takes into Belgium.

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Written by

Jack Renn

Jack Renn is an editor at F1 Chronicle and a veteran motorsport journalist with 25 years of experience covering Formula 1 and international motorsport. A member of the Association Internationale de la Presse Sportive (AIPS), the global body representing accredited sports journalists, Jack has spent his career reporting from paddocks and press rooms across the F1 calendar. His work spans race analysis, technical insight, and in-depth features, giving readers authoritative coverage grounded in decades of firsthand experience at the highest level of the sport.

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