Aug.19 (GMM) The boss of F1’s smallest workforce has rubbished comparisons between 2025 rookie Oliver Bearman and former Haas driver Nikita Mazepin.
Since Haas unsuccessfully paired Russian driver Mazepin with one other rookie Mick Schumacher again in 2021, the workforce has solely run extremely skilled drivers.
That’s altering for 2025, with 19-year-old Ferrari junior Bearman to be paired with the skilled however controversial Alpine refugee Estaban Ocon.
When requested if he’s anxious about his first driver pairing choice since taking up from former Haas boss Gunther Steiner, Ayao Komatsu answered: “You need to belief your drivers and make them really feel snug. Then they’ll carry out.
“Esteban undoubtedly has the expertise and the suitable work ethic,” the Japanese instructed Auto Motor und Sport. “He actually wished to be a part of our mission. He’s nonetheless younger and has one thing to show.
“It’s our job to create the suitable surroundings for each drivers and ensure they work effectively collectively. Possibly I’m a bit naive, and possibly I will likely be proved fallacious, but when I wasn’t totally satisfied that each will pull collectively for the workforce, I wouldn’t have chosen them.”
Bearman impressed the F1 world when he scored factors in his one-off debut within the unwell Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari seat in Jeddah early this season – however his present season in Formulation 2 has been much less convincing.
“Everybody reacted like he received in Jeddah, however he wasn’t even matching the tempo of the opposite Ferrari,” 1997 world champion Jacques Villeneuve stated.
“Bearman nonetheless must make that subsequent step – he has carried out sufficient to deserve that likelihood at Haas however now we are going to see how good of a driver he actually is.”
As for Komatsu, he denied comparisons which can be being made between Bearman’s Haas debut subsequent 12 months and the final rookie experiment with Mazepin.
“Each state of affairs is completely different,” he stated. “You may’t put a Nikita Mazepin and an Ollie Bearman in the identical class. That’s nonsense,” the Haas workforce principal insisted. “I see clear potential in Ollie.”
He additionally downplayed the importance of Bearman’s F2 struggles this season.
“I’ve no clarification for this as a result of I don’t know sufficient about Formulation 2 and the strengths and weaknesses of the Prema workforce,” stated Komatsu.
“For me, the information from his FP1 outings in our automotive are rather more worthwhile. We now have all the data we want from that.”
