Oliver Bearman says that going wheel-to-wheel with veteran Lewis Hamilton in only his second Formula 1 start in Baku was “very clean but hard” racing.
Hamilton got past Bearman in the late stages, and then both men gained places from the Sainz/Perez crash.
They also both passed Bearman’s Haas team mate Nico Hulkenberg immediately after the accident scene, just before the VSC was dispatched.
In taking 10th place Bearman also became the first driver in history to score points for two different teams in his first two races.
“It’s definitely cool,” he said when asked by formu1a.uno about the record. “It was a tough race. I wasn’t running in the points until 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, just saving the tyres too much.
“And that was not really necessary. I took too much the experience from FP2 into the race.
“But honestly, the track is so different in the race that you can almost forget the long runs in FP2, and start again. I put it down to experience.”
Hamilton caught him at one stage early in the race before dropping back to save his tyres and the closing back up again.
“We were going like that, like a yo-yo, quite a lot,” he said. “I was really pushing hard for some laps to overtake Franco [Colapinto].
“And my tyres were really hot, and it was exactly at that point that he pounced on me, and could overtake me quite easily.
“After that, I needed a few laps, then I caught him back up, and I was almost catching the DRS again. So yeah, it’s annoying that I let him overtake. But a guy like that, you can do little mistakes.”
Asked what it was like to race the seven-times champion Bearman said: “You know when you go on the outside that he’s going to leave you space, which is a nice feeling.
“Like in Turn 1, I knew he wasn’t going to put me in the wall, which is a bit less sure with some other drivers! So that’s a nice feeling. And it was always very clean but hard when I was racing him.”
Regarding his opportunistic late pass of Hulkenberg he said: “It went green again, and I managed to get him, with Lewis. Yeah, it was an overtake. Of course I’m sorry for him – he had a problem – to lose the position, also to Franco, but good to take a point.”
Earlier in the race when Bearman was ahead the team asked its drivers to swap positions, so he allowed Hulkenberg to pass.
“I wanted one more lap to speed up, but they didn’t want that,” he noted. “But that’s fine, I wasn’t fast enough at that point in the race, and I was getting in the way of the strategy at that point.
“Nico was by far the faster car, so it’s really my fault that I wasn’t pushing hard enough. That really compromised my race, the fact that I was too slow in the first stint, because I got myself in some traffic for the second one.”
