Oliver Bearman to start Australian GP from the pit lane after difficult weekend

Oliver Bearman has suffered another blow to what has already been a dreadful weekend for the Haas F1 driver. The rookie will start the Australian Grand Prix from the pit lane after the team changed suspension set-up on his car.

Bearman crashed out in the first day of practice, requiring a power unit replacement before lights out on the first race of the season. He then beached his car in the gravel during Saturday’s final practice session and suffered a mechanical issue in qualifying without recording a lap time. 

He was quick to own up to his mistakes, telling reporters that his errors were clumsy. “It’s a petty unforgiving circuit and two seemingly small errors giving big consequences and missing out on all of my running. It was clumsiness from my side to make these errors, honestly, and that’s not good enough,” he said. “And then of course the gearbox issue and the qualifying pretty much sums up what we’ve had so far.”

Oliver Bearman, Haas F1 Team

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

The 19-year-old Brit said the team was also lacking performance, with his teammate Esteban Ocon starting just one place ahead of him on Sunday. “There’s a long season ahead of us, I’m not gonna get down about two days in a very long season. I think as a team we’re struggling a bit more than we anticipated and more than we looked in Bahrain, so you know we’ve got a bit of work to do on that side of things on pure car performance and, of course, I haven’t helped out very much because the team’s pretty much running with one car,” he said.

“Obviously I haven’t done enough laps to really feel what the car is handling like I can only tell you from Esteban’s comments, but just on pure lap time we’re not that strong.”