Oliver Bearman stared down Verstappen in Mexico — and found a new gear at Haas
Oliver Bearman got a taste of the sharp end in Mexico City and, by his own admission, it was a little terrifying. It was also very, very real. The Haas rookie fought Max Verstappen on merit, soaked up relentless pressure from front-running machinery and banked a career-best fourth place — matching Haas’s all-time high watermark set by Romain Grosjean back in 2018.
From ninth on the grid, Bearman launched cleanly, threaded himself between the Mercedes cars and then cashed in when Lewis Hamilton and Verstappen clashed up the road. With Hamilton serving a penalty and dropping out of the picture, Bearman suddenly found himself in podium territory, with that looming Red Bull in the mirrors.
Verstappen would only clear the Haas later via strategy; on track, he couldn’t do it. That’s the part Bearman took most pride in — because for all the good fortune that helped him arrive in the fight, staying there was honest work.
“It was probably the most pressure I’ve ever felt in a race,” he admitted afterwards, half-laughing at how surreal it felt to go wheel-to-wheel with a driver he grew up watching. He’s not polishing it up either — he openly said he was “sh**ting” himself when they went side-by-side. Welcome to the deep end.
This wasn’t a defensive miracle powered solely by elbows and luck. Haas has brought a late-season update to the VF-25 — a reworked floor aimed at tidying up high-speed corners — and it’s landed. While much of the midfield has turned a heavier gaze toward 2026, Haas has slipped a genuine step forward into the present. Bearman’s Sunday pace backed that up: Verstappen in stint one, Andrea Kimi Antonelli after that, then George Russell, then Oscar Piastri — high-grade opposition, none able to simply breeze past.
Bearman still sees the ceiling. He reckons their qualifying deficit is a touch too big to make this kind of Sunday a habit, and he’s right: track position is currency in this field, and P9s don’t often convert into P4s unless the racing gods lend a hand. But he and Haas put the car in the right places at the right times, and then he defended like a driver who belongs up there.
“Hopefully this can be a normal thing instead of a one-off,” Bearman said. It didn’t sound like bluster. It sounded like a kid discovering he’s got the tools.
Inside the garage, the tone is similar — impressed, but measured. Team boss Ayao Komatsu didn’t bother debating Bearman’s raw speed; that part, he says, is settled. The project now is consistency, getting the weekend to peak at the right moments. “He’s still a rookie,” Komatsu noted, pointing to a season that’s mixed sharp Saturdays with the odd bump and a rising level of Sunday authority. Mexico felt like the latest step in a neat upward line.
It was also a neat little full-circle moment. Two years ago in Mexico, Bearman had his first run in an official F1 session with Haas. He looked mature then; now he races that way. Komatsu joked that he’s no longer a teenager and praised how open he is to feedback — even the uncomfortable kind. That’s catnip to a midfield team trying to punch up.
There was some luck in the result, as Bearman readily acknowledged. If he’d ended Lap 5 in P10, he suspects we’d be talking about P8 or P9, not P4. But the stronger truth is that once the chance presented itself, he and Haas had enough car to keep it. When a Red Bull can’t drive past you and a McLaren can’t rattle you into a mistake over the final laps in Mexico’s thin air, you’re doing something right.
The bigger question is what this means for the next few races. The calendar now swings to Interlagos, where changeable weather and a short lap compress the field and punish poor qualifying. Bearman’s own to-do list is clear: bleed a little of that race-day calm into Saturdays, trim the gap, and keep the VF-25 in fresher air.
If Haas has indeed found a sweet spot with its late-season floor, we might be seeing the outline of a team that didn’t simply settle into the 2025 midfield slog. And if Mexico is the day Bearman stopped being “the rookie who subbed in for Ferrari once” and became the rookie who outlasted the frontrunners at altitude, it won’t be the last time a Verstappen or a Piastri finds a Haas parked stubbornly in the way.
Now, let’s see if they can make it normal.
