Oliver Bearman opens up about the downside of the extensive travel as a Formula 1 driver. Although the Haas driver is grateful for his job in the premier class, it was sometimes lonely during the long flights to the next Grands Prix during his debut season. Bearman therefore decided to hire a coach: ‘I really learned to take a step back’.
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Oliver Bearman saw a long-cherished dream come true in 2025: he made his debut in Formula 1. His career gained momentum after the 2024 Saudi Arabian GP, when he had to replace an ill Carlos Sainz at Ferrari at the last minute. Bearman impressed with his seventh-place finish, and a year later he was behind the wheel at Haas. The driver honestly admits to having struggled with loneliness during his first Formula 1 year.
“Yes, I struggled with that. Even more so (than F2, ed.) because you are often traveling for longer,” he explained in the High Performance podcast. “You travel to more distant places, where people sometimes don’t speak English very well. You can be in Japan or China and there are language barriers there too. When you don’t hear your own language around you, it’s a bit strange.” Yet Bearman was not completely alone. “I am very lucky that my father made a lot of effort to come to many races last year. That is almost a kind of continuity for me. But especially at the beginning of the year, I found the travel very challenging, simply because F1 has ten more races than F2. But those ten extra races are all the furthest destinations on the calendar.”
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‘I was just waiting for the next race’
For Bearman, the contrast between being busy at the track with hundreds of people around him and then going back to an empty house was particularly difficult. “At the beginning of the year, I was just with my girlfriend in Monaco and my family didn’t live there,” the twenty-year-old driver continues. “So I would come home and was almost just waiting for the next race. I felt like my life was only about racing. I found that quite tough.”
The Briton decided to hire a coach then. He learned a way to deal with his struggles. “Something I really learned during this year or really started to pay attention to is being grateful and taking a step back, because I think perspective is also important. It can be difficult sometimes, but if I told my 10-year-old self what I’m doing now, I think he would be very happy. I think it’s very important to put things in perspective and appreciate everything around you.”
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