As Oliver Bearman took a moment to compose himself in the media pen, watching his father and girlfriend hugging each other to celebrate his fourth-place finish at the Mexican Grand Prix, it was obvious the Englishman was choking back tears. The 20-year-old Haas rookie, in the first of a two-year contract with the American team, had just equaled its best result in nine years of competing in Formula 1.
“It’s very special,” Bearman told Dutch broadcaster ViaPlay. “You didn’t need to show me her! Now I’m emotional.”
At one stage, Bearman had even appeared to be on for a fairytale podium, courtesy of a moment of drama early on. If F1 fans wanted to see a coming-of-age moment unfold in front of their eyes, they got it on lap six of the thrillingly chaotic race at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez.
As Lewis Hamilton — the man who Ferrari academy product Bearman might one day replace at the Italian team — went straight on at Turn 4, Max Verstappen also misjudged his braking point and went slightly deep into the corner, a move that then compromised the exit of Bearman’s friend Kimi Antonelli in the Mercedes as they came through Turn 5. Bearman, who had been following the Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes closely behind in sixth, needed no second invitation. He darted up the inside.
Suddenly, he was wheel to wheel with the man Bearman has previously said is probably the best F1 driver ever, Verstappen, four-time world champion and an outsider in this year’s title fight.
“Honestly, I was, s—-ing myself, going side by side with Max,” Bearman joked later.
The most unlikely of drag races followed, Bearman’s Haas vs. Verstappen’s Red Bull, and it was the former who won it, holding the position despite an incredible sideways moment through the Esses that follow. Bearman was up to fourth, which soon became third when Hamilton served his time penalty for the off-track moment — only Verstappen’s alternate strategy to the rest denied Haas their long-awaited moment to celebrate on the rostrum.
But that cannot take away from Bearman’s drive. As has been the case with his fellow rookies this year, he never looked out of place at the front. There’s been up-and-down moments as you would expect from a debutant, but the highs have been incredibly high.
“It’s really cool to go relatively well with these people that I’ve been following since I started watching F1,” he added. “I have them in my mirrors during the race, it was probably the most pressure that I had so far … It’s cool and I didn’t expect to be fighting with these top cars this year or this stage of my career, but it gives me a great feeling for the future and hopefully that can be a normal thing and not a one-off.”
No one who has watched this year would doubt that final point. While there’s been ups and downs for all of them, Bearman, Antonelli, Racing Bulls’ Isack Hadjar and Sauber’s Gabriel Bortoleto have all exceeded the expectations for rookie drivers.
As ever, Ferrari was keeping a watchful eye on Bearman’s progress. He memorably made his Formula 1 debut for the team at last year’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix as a stand-in for Carlos Sainz when the Spanish driver suffered appendicitis, and he appears to be the future of the race team at what is an admittedly very uncertain time for the Scuderia. Team boss Frédéric Vasseur was impressed at what he saw.
“At one stage, I was thinking about a podium for him,” Vasseur said. “He did very well, but if you have a look from the beginning of the season, he’s doing well. Quite often, he had a small issue in the weekend, either in quali or in the race. And this weekend, he put everything together. He made zero mistakes and he’s paying off.”
Bearman’s drive was a reminder of one obvious reason the tifosi have to be optimistic in what has been an especially underwhelming year. After coming just a single overtake from beating McLaren to the constructors’ championship last year, and with the addition of statistically the greatest driver of all time in Hamilton this season, 2025 was supposed to be the long-overdue awakening of the grid’s most famous race team. Hype coming into the year was at a fever pitch.
Instead F1’s serial underachiever has done it again, delivering a wholly deflating year — it is staring down the barrel of its third winless F1 season in ten years and first since 2021. The cracks caused as a result have been obvious.
Last month, Ferrari chairman John Elkann felt compelled to give a public show of support to the under-fire Vasseur, a key architect of the Hamilton deal, saying he had “full confidence” in the Frenchman’s ability. The new contract Vasseur was given in July has done little to quiet the noise around his job; fresh rumors linking Ferrari to former Red Bull boss Christian Horner — which sources have told ESPN are wide of the mark — have refused to go away, speaking to the genuine pressure the race team is under to finally live up to the precedent set by the dynastic success enjoyed by Michael Schumacher, Jean Todt, Ross Brawn and the Scuderia of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The uncertainty has filtered down beyond Vasseur.
While Hamilton was always going to struggle to live up to the expectations his reputation and reported $70 million contract brought with it, the growing chatter around Charles Leclerc‘s own future has been difficult to ignore. Since Baku’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix, the Italian media — sometimes very well informed, other times prone to wild hyperbole, occasionally a troublesome mix of both — has been speculating that Leclerc and his agent Nicolas Todt are seriously considering a future elsewhere after 2026, when his contract expires. Much of that decision will hinge on the competitiveness of Ferrari under the new regulations coming into force next year.
Leclerc, considered F1’s best qualifier and a man who has never quite been given the race car needed to live up to his world drivers’ champion potential, would have plenty of suitors should he decide that he needs a lifeboat away from Maranello. That would be a devastating blow to the team. Nothing would better encapsulate Ferrari’s long-term Formula 1 ineptitude than Leclerc — Mr. Ferrari, a man dubbed “Il Predestinato” (“The Predestined”), the Monaco kid who only ever dreamed of racing for the Prancing Horse — deciding he has to leave to realize his championship ambitions.
As for Hamilton, several senior paddock figures have suggested to ESPN that the seven-time world champion will not be offered another contract when his expires at the end of 2026 given his performances. That seems a premature prediction, but what is clear is that something has not clicked between the British driver and Italian team this year, even if his outright pace relative to Leclerc has not been quite as bad as some naysayers have suggested.
Hamilton had always said he was joining to be competitive in 2026, not 2025, but the nature of this season has made that an even bigger point of focus. Expectations on both sides of that equation will be high next season — Hamilton will expect a better race car and likely a more coherent race operation behind the scenes; Ferrari will expect a driver who better meets Hamilton’s superstar billing. The two may well go hand in hand.
Whatever happens in 2026, both with Ferrari’s car and the drivers inside its cockpit, Mexico was a reminder that the driver pipeline is in a very good place. Speaking ahead of Ferrari’s home race at Monza in September, Bearman was asked about the timeline for such a move.
“Of course, that’s my goal in life,” he said at the time. “I got a taste of doing that when I got the call-up last year and that is my motivation in life, really, to hopefully one day be able to do that. But there’s a lot of steps in between and currently my career lies with Haas. I need to prove that I’m capable of, first of all, driving for a top team by doing more consistent performances here.”
Bearman’s drive to fourth in Mexico City looked very much like a driver very capable and very comfortable at the business end of the grid.
The year of the rookie
It would be unfair to write an article about the drive of Bearman’s rookie season without shining a light on the grid’s other youngsters.
Handing out the Rookie of the Year award will be a tricky one at the end of the season, and four drivers have a great case for it. Bearman’s drive in Mexico was remarkable given the tiny size of the Haas operation relative to its rivals and comes at a time when he is clearly getting better with each passing week.
Hadjar’s Zandvoort podium was spectacular, as has been his turnaround since crashing out on the formation lap of his debut in Australia. He was so good during some parts of the year that it raised the question of what Verstappen could have done had he driven the middle part of the year in a Racing Bulls instead of a Red Bull. Hadjar looks the favorite to be Verstappen’s teammate at Red Bull next season as a reward for his superb season.
Bortoleto has not had the car to match some of those heroics and his results are less spectacular, but he has grown and grown as a rookie, and results like sixth place in Hungary have been a great indication of his talent.
Then there’s Antonelli. The Mercedes teenager’s season has been the wild rollercoaster team boss Toto Wolff predicted it would be, and there can be no argument that he has been under the most pressure of any of this year’s rookies. After a genuinely worrying spell of form in the middle of the year, the Italian appears to have found himself again, scoring points at five of the past seven races, including sixth place ahead of teammate George Russell on Sunday. Antonelli’s reward for that turnaround was Mercedes’ recent confirmation that he will stay at the team with Russell in 2026. The Silver Arrows’ approach of dropping the 19-year-old in at the deep end was a risky one, but it could well pay dividends next season.
Liam Lawson technically counts as a rookie, as he will complete his first full season despite spells with Red Bull’s junior team in both 2023 and 2024. While he might seem like the anomaly in the class, he deserves his dues as well. Given his horribly managed, two-race stint at Red Bull, he has done a genuinely admirable job reviving his career at Racing Bulls in circumstances that might have destroyed the confidence of another driver.
Red Bull and Racing Bulls now appear to be stuck between which of Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda, both unfortunate victims of how difficult it is to be Verstappen’s teammate, least deserve the boot compared to the other. Sources have suggested Lawson will be retained alongside Red Bull’s Formula 2 junior Arvid Lindblad. The potential jettisoning of 25-year-old Tsunoda is another reminder of just how fast Formula 1’s generational change is taking place.
It’s remarkable to see such a shift take place in such an obvious way. Lando Norris, who in 2019 was part of the last highly touted rookie class, which also boasted Russell and Alex Albon, now leads the championship ahead of third-year teammate Oscar Piastri. Like Norris, Russell and Albon, the Class of 2025 looks like one that will go down in the history books as something extraordinarily special.
