Qualifying in Singapore saw an excellent effort from Oliver Bearman as the Haas Formula 1 team driver secured P9, providing some redemption after disappointment in Azerbaijan.
In Baku the team was very quick throughout practice. Indeed the rookie was an impressive fifth on Friday and eighth in FP3, benefiting from having done the race the previous year.
However things fell apart in qualifying and after tapping the wall in Q1 and again in Q2 he was left stranded in 15th on the grid.
Singapore was always going to be a tricky one as it was a track Bearman didn’t know. He was a solid 12th on Friday, but then things really came together in qualifying as he made Q3 for only the third time this year, having been 10th at Suzuka and eighth at Silverstone until a red flag penalty sent him down the grid.
This time at least he gets to start from his rightful place, and he’s on the clean side.
“Definitely happy,” he said when I asked him about his session. “Yesterday I was not the fastest, but I think I was building up well to this track, which is certainly a tough one. And it’s the first time that I’ve had to learn a street track for a while, because you do all the other ones in F2, but this one you don’t.
“Having slept on it, coming back, I felt like I was a bit more on it. And straight away from the first lap of P3 some corners that I couldn’t quite figure out yesterday were clicking, which is normally the case for myself.
“And then quali just went well. We had a clean session, every lap was improving, the car felt good. When the car feels like that underneath you it’s easy to get lap time out of it, because it’s very predictable.
“It’s a good feeling, considering where we started, at least with my confidence level and stuff, I think we did a good job.”
Bearman certainly deserves a bit of good fortune after facing a few disappointments with grid penalties and the like this year.
“It’s been a long time coming as well,” he said. “In Baku I think we were on for a result very similar to this one, until I got caught out by the wind. So it’s been a few races now that I think we’ve been really up there.
“In Monza, I was a hair away from Q3 as well. So qualifying has been going pretty well recently. I’m glad that we finally have a good result to really show for it, and hopefully we can translate that into a good race.”
He added: “Of course, without the wind, everything is much more stable and consistent. So that makes life much, much easier.
“Every corner feels the same every lap, rather than Baku, which was a question mark. But that was a thing in my head, and probably part of the reason I was a bit slow yesterday, just building up step-by-step.”
He’s already in the top 10 at a race which usually sees some attrition, and now he has to make sure he’s not part of that.
“We’re starting P9, so we don’t have to have such a crazy race,” he said. “Of course, looking forward, but very aware that people can undercut.
“And strategy is quite important here, you can’t really overtake on track, so I think it’s just about covering all of the bases, and hopefully we can have a good one tomorrow.”
If Bearman was happy after qualifying his Haas team mate Esteban Ocon definitely wasn’t. Having been P7 and declared Friday in Singapore his best opening day of the season the Frenchman wasn’t happy with changes for FP3.
He improved the car but a seatbelt issue and then the yellow flag for Pierre Gasly’s stricken car cost him in Q1, and left him a frustrated 19th.
“FP3 was slightly worse than Friday for sure, but we managed to get back to a sensible place at the end of FP3,” he said when I asked about his trouble. “And we were pretty decent.
“In qualifying two issues in two runs, the biggest one being the yellow flag. I tried not to lose too much time, which already is not the thing that you should do on the yellow flag, but I tried to.
“It was a slow corner, so as soon as you release the throttle a little bit, you lose a lot of time, because it’s a lot of time spent there. And I lost three-tenths. The three-tenths was enough to go to Q2 already, and we could have built from there with two more sets of tyres.
“In the first run, an issue that came out of nowhere, that didn’t happen the whole year, the belt, I don’t know, it got clipped somewhere, and I basically couldn’t brake properly on the whole first lap.”
He added: “It was fine on the out lap, and basically, I don’t know what happened on the crotch belt, but on the first braking, when I braked, it completely moved. And I got it exactly in the wrong place… As you can imagine, I couldn’t brake properly.”
After his Azerbaijan weekend fell apart the last thing Ocon needed was more disappointment in Singapore.
“I think Baku was more something that was related to the car in terms of braking, where we struggled, quite a lot of front locking and stuff. I think here was slightly better.
“Even though it wasn’t perfect. I managed to get away with it. We should have been through that’s it, if there was no yellow flag. There’s no rocket science.”
Adam Cooper F1 