Oliver Bearman felt sorry for Nico Hulkenberg after he lost points places at the end of F1 Azerbaijan GP, as the German was left confused by the situation.
It was a good start initially from Haas’ Bearman in F1 Azerbaijan GP, but the team deployed team orders against him in the first stint to allow Hulkenberg in front of him with a better pace. The Brit conceded the place and agreed to what the team said.
He noted how he didn’t push enough as he was relying on FP2 data which wasn’t needed at that time, but put it down to lack of experience eventually. “I wanted one more lap to speed up, but the team didn’t want that, it was fine,” said Bearman to media.
“I wasn’t fast enough at that point of the race, and I was getting in the way of strategy at that point, Nico was the faster car. So, it was really my fault that I was not pushing hard enough. That really compromised my race, I got myself in some traffic for the second part.”
Once that was done, in the second stint, he was engulfed in a big fight which had Hulkenberg, Williams’ Franco Colapinto and Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton. While the German was ahead initially along with the Argentine, the Brit was behind him in the order.
Bearman had his fights with Hamilton, which was surreal in a way for him. He had faith on the world champion to keep it clean as well. The Mercedes driver eventually got through him, but not before a strong fight put up by the F2 racer.
“We were going like that, like a yo-yo,” recalled Bearman. “I was really pushing hard for some laps to overtake Franco and my tyres were getting really hot. It was exactly at that point that he pounced on me and could overtake me quite easily.
“After that, I needed a few laps and I caught him back up and was almost catching the DRS again. It’s annoying that I let him overtake but you can’t make little mistakes with a guy like that behind. When you go around the outside that he’s going to leave you space, which is a nice feeling.
“In Turn 1, I knew that he wasn’t going to put me in a wall, which is a bit less sure with some other drivers. That’s a nice feeling and it’s always very clean but hard when I was racing him,” summed up Bearman, who in the fight also passed ailing teammate right on the final lap to take away the one point from him.
In doing so, he felt sorry but entered in the record book for being the first driver to score for two different teams in his first two races. “It’s definitely cool, it was a tough race,” recalled Bearman. “I wasn’t running in the points till the end because of the crash in front. The car was really fast and honestly I was really fast as well.
“I just lost a lot of time in the first stint, just not driving very fast. I was just saving the tyres too much and that was not really necessary. I took too much of the experience from FP2 into the race but the track is so different in the race that you can almost forget the long runs from FP2 and start again. I put that down to experience.
“It went green again [at the end] and I managed to get him with Lewis. It was an overtake. I’m sorry for [Hulkenberg]. He had a problem to lose the position also to Franco, but I’m happy to take the point,” summed up Bearman, whose teammate Hulkenberg was left confused and taken aback by how the things ended in the grand prix.
He felt undone much like Max Verstappen and George Russell, who raised the query about lack of safety car and or red flag in the situation. “It went completely the wrong way,” said Hulkenberg. “I kind of lost the position. A few things happened, don’t want to go into detail now. I need to process it and look on the replays and see exactly what the team go through. There were multiple things going on, pretty hectic for me.
“Obviously, the incident also, I mean, massive crash, massive war zone, debris everywhere. I was surprised it was a double yellow, and then it was back to green, which confused me, and I got caught off guard there and lost positions. So, very surreal last two laps, unfortunately, we came out on the wrong side of it.
“I hit something quite big and substantial. I wasn’t sure where my front wing was, I had a quite big hit on the front. Yeah, very confusing. To be honest, that was my initial [thought] when I went by, I was like, ‘whoa’. How can we still race when there’s two cars in a high-speed area with so much debris everywhere? So I’m surprised, usually they’re very fast, Neils with that reaction, but today it was more kind of the opposite. So, a bit unusual.”
Here’s the pass: https://x.com/F1/status/1835683558343790980
Here’s the crash: https://www.formula1.com/en/video/2024-azerbaijan-grand-prix-huge-drama-in-baku-as-perez-and-sainz-crash-on-the-penultimate-lap.1810270459616242645
Here’s Williams’ out foxing not working against Aston Martin
Here’s how F1 Azerbaijan GP panned out
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