80 replies to this topic

[Afterburner]

I'm not sure exactly what else you'd expect from a driver parachuted in from F2 on Saturday morning to achieve. His pace was good for the amount of time he's had in the car. He didn't destroy the car, or break any rules, or even look like breaking the rules. He qualified well and he made up positions in the race. What else do you want?
 
I think the 10 implies that they could have done no better in the circumstances. Not that nobody could.

I think everything you described is a performance worthy of a 7 or 8, not a 10, which is where I take issue with Bearman's rating even accounting for the circumstances. He finished in the position I'd more or less expect a reserve driver to finish in that car given those circumstances, and meeting expectations is not a circumstance in which I'd award a 10.

To me, a 10 would've meant finishing close to Leclerc or challenging him for the last spot on the podium—the kind of performance that would leave no doubt he was a future WDC, not one that leaves that prospect ambiguous. It's all subjective anyway; I tend to think a "10" should be reserved for legendary performances and I wouldn't describe Bearman's performance as such. It was a good job but to me that's all it was. For all we know Zhou has put in performances Alonso couldn't even match some races and only got something like 15th for it, totally ignored, and probably given a 7. I guess if you can't possibly know how good a drive actually was it's better to be nice about it, but that sort of makes all of this a bit silly and that's really what I was trying to call out—opinions and assholes and all that. 

[PayasYouRace]

I think everything you described is a performance worthy of a 7 or 8, not a 10, which is where I take issue with Bearman's rating even accounting for the circumstances. He finished in the position I'd more or less expect a reserve driver to finish in that car given those circumstances, and meeting expectations is not a circumstance in which I'd award a 10.

To me, a 10 would've meant finishing close to Leclerc or challenging him for the last spot on the podium—the kind of performance that would leave no doubt he was a future WDC, not one that leaves that prospect ambiguous. It's all subjective anyway; I tend to think a "10" should be reserved for legendary performances and I wouldn't describe Bearman's performance as such. It was a good job but to me that's all it was. For all we know Zhou has put in performances Alonso couldn't even match some races and only got something like 15th for it, totally ignored, and probably given a 7. I guess if you can't possibly know how good a drive actually was it's better to be nice about it, but that sort of makes all of this a bit silly and that's really what I was trying to call out—opinions and assholes and all that. 

So harsh.

[Red5ive]

I think Tv and media like to hype things up - lost count of the number of times "bearman" was said during their sessions at the weekend - (even ignoring Crofts insistance on rolling out every "bear" pun he could think of.)

 

Concentrating on the fact he is only 18 and totally ignoring his racing experience, his work in the Ferrari simulator and his previous FP1 run -outs.

 

Yes - obviously its a stressful situation for any young driver to suddenly find themselves in an F1  race weekend but the mere fact he is Ferraris reserve suggests he has what it takes - and in the 2nd fastest car on the grid getting into the points is perfectly within reach -as he showed.

 

So if we are scoring - for me its a solid 7/10. If he was the next big thing we would have been looking at 3rd or 4th,

Edited by Red5ive, 12 March 2024 - 17:38.

[MikeTekRacing]

 He finished in the position I'd more or less expect a reserve driver to finish in that car given those circumstances, and meeting expectations is not a circumstance in which I'd award a 10.

You have very high expectations. 

[Myrvold]

Bearman 10, Lawson 8. There seems to be an additional bias there…

As seen with Aitken being the joint lowest... or...

[Myrvold]

Last one I remember jumping in after FP2 was Di Resta in the Hungaroring in a Williams. He was pretty bad, qualifying 8 tenths behind Stroll. And he wasn't a rookie.

However. Di Resta didnt even get FP3, hadn't raced in F1 since 2013 and reportedly had 10 laps in a 2014 car as all his hybrid-era experience (plus a few sim laps).

It's not like he was prepared at all for it.

[Gravelngrass]

As seen with Aitken being the joint lowest... or...

WhoTF is Aitken?

[southernstars]

WhoTF is Aitken?

 

The totally forgettable driver who stood in for Russell when Russell was standing in for Hamilton.

[PayasYouRace]

WhoTF is Aitken?

Try this: https://www.autospor...976710/4976710/

[pacificquay]

WhoTF is Aitken?

Disrepectful

[PayasYouRace]

Disrepectful

Sorry, would you say Aitken is disrespectful?

[pacificquay]

Sorry, would you say Aitken is disrespectful?

No, someone saying “whoTF is Aitken?” is disrespectful.

 

Everyone who has raced in F1 is a hero, beyond the comprehension of most of us.

 

And even if the poster missed Jack’s appearance in a Grand Prix a quick Google of “Aitken Grand Prix Driver” would be more productive than resorting to profanity.

 

Even worse of course if the poster already knew who he is and was going down the route of faux ignorance for reasons of belittling.

[PayasYouRace]

We can’t all be walking encyclopaedias of F1 drivers. Chill out.

[Gravelngrass]

Disrepectful

Sorry, whoTF is Aitken? 🌻🦄🌈💕💫👼

[Nobody]

Is it too late to talk about Luca Badoer?

[Afterburner]

WhoTF is Aitken?

A 12 Hours of Sebring winner and major contributor to Action Express Racing's IMSA championships? Just because he had an anonymous day in F1 doesn't mean he's a nobody as a racing driver.

[messy]

Aitken was probably never really F1 material but he was a safe, solid, experienced F2 driver who did okay in his cameo. He was legitimately one of the best F2 drivers in an admittedly weak field in 2019. With more preparation longer term I doubt he'd have been worse than Latifi was.

Edited by messy, 13 March 2024 - 14:23.

[MikeTekRacing]

We can’t all be walking encyclopaedias of F1 drivers. Chill out.

no, but we all have Google. The time it takes someone to post WhoTF is X here and wait for an answer is way bigger than just going to google.com and doing the same thing

[Ben24]

Key details: how many of those jumped in after FP2, and in a difficult street circuit with fast bends next to walls, and aged only 18, and with a star driver as team-mate.

 

Last one I remember jumping in after FP2 was Di Resta in the Hungaroring in a Williams. He was pretty bad, qualifying 8 tenths behind Stroll. And he wasn't a rookie.

Every single one of the previous 3 replacements happened after FP2. Bearman jumped in for Sainz in FP3, Lawson for Ricciardo in FP3 and De Vries for Massa in FP3. Admittedly De Vries did also get to drive the Aston Martin in FP1 the weekend he drove for Williams which would've helped a little. It is a totally different car to the Williams he raced though.

 

As for Di Resta, he jumped in for qualifying without a single practice lap at all. He hadn't driven an F1 car at all for about 4 years either (and the difference in pace between the 2013 and 2017 cars wasn't actually all that dissimilar to the the difference between a current and F2 and F1 car). He also lacked the simulator work all the current reserve drivers get, which is perhaps the biggest disadvantage of all when it comes to getting up to pace quickly. I find it funny you mentioned his qualifying performance in a negative light because I actually think it's arguably the best effort of any of the recent stand ins. Of course, the Stroll factor makes it a lot harder to judge just how good Di Resta actually was that day - there are days when Stroll puts in respectable laps near what the top guys are capable of and other days where he's the best part of second off their pace. 

[F1matt]

It has to be an advantage for a driver to find out as late as possible he is stepping into a F1 car for a one off race; I think the pressure would have built up a lot earlier on Oli Bearman if he had found out on the Monday or Tuesday of race week, giving him the additional pressure of media duties, over thinking how he is going to perform, the excitement disrupting his usual routine, lack of sleep due to excitement etc?

[noikeee]

Every single one of the previous 3 replacements happened after FP2. Bearman jumped in for Sainz in FP3, Lawson for Ricciardo in FP3 and De Vries for Massa in FP3. Admittedly De Vries did also get to drive the Aston Martin in FP1 the weekend he drove for Williams which would've helped a little. It is a totally different car to the Williams he raced though.

As for Di Resta, he jumped in for qualifying without a single practice lap at all. He hadn't driven an F1 car at all for about 4 years either (and the difference in pace between the 2013 and 2017 cars wasn't actually all that dissimilar to the the difference between a current and F2 and F1 car). He also lacked the simulator work all the current reserve drivers get, which is perhaps the biggest disadvantage of all when it comes to getting up to pace quickly. I find it funny you mentioned his qualifying performance in a negative light because I actually think it's arguably the best effort of any of the recent stand ins. Of course, the Stroll factor makes it a lot harder to judge just how good Di Resta actually was that day - there are days when Stroll puts in respectable laps near what the top guys are capable of and other days where he's the best part of second off their pace.

Fair enough, I honestly didn't remember all those details.

Bearman had the advantage of having lapped the circuit the same weekend too, but on a F2 car. Still think doing this in a street circuit is particularly difficult though.

[Laster]

I do think the bar gets set way too low and De Vries was a good example of it, where on a weekend where he had a car well suited to the track and a terrible teammate to be compared against people flipped for him when he duly delivered a couple points. Then he went up against Tsunoda with most anticipating him to wipe the floor with Tsunoda and it just never even looked close to happening.

When Bearman was announced I saw Chris Medland put out a tweet saying anything better than 20th would be an outstanding effort, which was just ridiculous. Ferrari is the second best car and that car has a big gap over the midfield for Bearman to have fitted into. He was also getting a chance to get a practice session in. It wasn’t much but for example when Hulkenberg jumped into the Racing Point at the Nurburgring and had to go straight into qualifying without any practice he ended up last and then worked his way forward into the points during the race as he got more into the rhythm across the course of the grand prix. Yet at Silverstone a few months prior with a few practices sessions beneath him, he qualified 3rd. So while an hour doesn’t seem like much it very clearly makes a big difference in finding the performance limits in the car.

Of course Bearman isn’t as experienced as Hulkenberg, but it also wasn’t his first time driving an F1 car, and he is a very good driver. So putting the bar as low as dead last remained ridiculous. For me I expected him to qualify 11th, behind all the cars of a similar pace, as well as whoever ended up being the fastest in the midfield. For the race I expected him to beat that midfield driver as the pace of the car would be too much for them, and also for him to beat Stroll, because Stroll. So I expected 9th however he ended up doing better than that, but that was largely because the safety car forced Norris and Hamilton to continue on to avoid waiting behind their teammates in the stops. Throw in a lack of tyre degradation in the race and it opened the door for Bearman to take 7th with Norris and Hamilton unable to make inroads on fresh tyres.

Personally I would give him an 8 out of 10 in part because it was his debut, he was error free and he had enough pace to keep hold of a position from Norris & Hamilton’s misfortune. But the result remained pretty close to the one I expected of him.

[Ben24]

Fair enough, I honestly didn't remember all those details.

Bearman had the advantage of having lapped the circuit the same weekend too, but on a F2 car. Still think doing this in a street circuit is particularly difficult though.

Yeah no doubt it is a tough track to extract the absolute maximum lap time from in during quali. Think he would've qualified closer to Leclerc at a more regular circuit. He also didn't get a proper clean lap in during quali so was clearly closer to Leclerc on ultimate raw pace than the final qualifying result showed.

 

On the other hand, I think the complete lack of any deg at all probably flattered him a bit in the race. I think there's almost no chance that he or any rookie in his situation would've been as competitive in a race where they had to manage higher deg. He did well not to make any mistakes and to maintain his pace all race on such a physically demanding circuit but I don't think he did anything much more than what I expected. To me he showed that he is capable of being at least a competent F1 driver who would perform better than a number of drivers on the current grid (something I was already convinced of beforehand) but not necessarily any better than some of the other top F2 drivers from previous years who haven't had a chance would've done.

[Ben24]

As a direct answer to this question, I believe it's abundantly clear that stand in drivers are generally being overrated. I think people underestimate just how well prepared most of these drivers are to step up to F1 these days. Pretty much everyone who gets a chance has graduated through F2 - which is much closer to F1 than drivers used to get in junior formulas -  and then spent hundreds of hours driving around on the team's sim. Whilst the sim is obviously not the same as the real thing and won't ever replace real life track experience, it is now close enough that the top F2 talents should reasonably be expected to almost immediately be well within 1 second of an experienced team mate. It's really those last few tenths that are the hardest ones to get and something you can't reasonably expect a stand in to achieve just through the sim. 

 

To be clear, I'm not saying that any average F2 driver could just step in and perform to that level but the calibre of drivers who get these chances are generally some of the top junior talents from each season. So maybe it's more a case of underestimating just how good most of these stand in drivers actually are rather than overestimating the difficulty of stepping up to F1. But at the end of the day, for whatever reason it seems to be clear that most people generally do set their expectations too low for these drivers.

[moreland]

Nice OP Anderis, I agree completely. If you're concluding that stand-in drivers have done an outstanding job every time, then you're probably setting the bar too low, they can't all have been outstanding. It's as if people have remember Badoer's performance in 2009 and set that as the expectation for every stand in driver ever since. One interesting fact, Bearman clocked up 22 practice laps in the F1 car but only 14 practice laps in the F2 car in Jeddah, despite missing 2 F1 practice sessions and not missing any F2 practice sessions.

[MikeTekRacing]

Nice OP Anderis, I agree completely. If you're concluding that stand-in drivers have done an outstanding job every time, then you're probably setting the bar too low, they can't all have been outstanding. It's as if people have remember Badoer's performance in 2009 and set that as the expectation for every stand in driver ever since. One interesting fact, Bearman clocked up 22 practice laps in the F1 car but only 14 practice laps in the F2 car in Jeddah, despite missing 2 F1 practice sessions and not missing any F2 practice sessions.

the thing with Bearman is that it's not just that he was a stand in driver with 1 practice session:

- he is an 18 year old with limited racing experience 

- first time in an F1 race

- testing is ridiculously low. He probably drove an F1 car before, but how many laps did he do in it?

- the track is a highspeed street track where the margine between hero and zero is super small

- his team mate is neither Latifi nor Stroll, but Leclerc, so there is a good benchmark

 

Hailing him as a next great already is clearly absurd. Saying he did a terrific job under all of he above is nothing we should be ashamed to say. It doesn't mean he is automatically a great driver to hype, but I'd want to see  him more. He earned that

[Myrvold]

- testing is ridiculously low. He probably drove an F1 car before, but how many laps did he do in it?

 

400km at Fiorano, so that's 133 laps in a 2021 car.

31 laps in the Haas in FP1 Mexico 2023.

24 laps in the Haas in FP1 Abu Dhabi 2023

110 laps in the young driver for Haas in Abu Dhabi 2023

Unknown amount of laps at Barcelona in a 2022 Ferrari the 31st of Jan 2024.

 

Then Saudi.

 

Why do I bother taking it literally and listing it up? Because it is more than some people think, it is also way less than what others think.

Edited by Myrvold, 14 March 2024 - 21:22.

[Myrvold]

We can’t all be walking encyclopaedias of F1 drivers. Chill out.

 

Nah, but when you (well, not you personally...) decide to comment on something, and basing it on a post with Aitken in it, I would assume that a minimum of checks will be done on the name(s) one might not have heard of, just to see if the "conspiracy" will hold water or not...

[moreland]

400km at Fiorano, so that's 133 laps in a 2021 car.

31 laps in the Haas in FP1 Mexico 2023.

24 laps in the Haas in FP1 Abu Dhabi 2023

110 laps in the young driver for Haas in Abu Dhabi 2023

Unknown amount of laps at Barcelona in a 2022 Ferrari the 31st of Jan 2024.

 

Then Saudi.

 

Why do I bother taking it literally and listing it up? Because it is more than some people think, it is also way less than what others think.

 

Not only that, but despite being only 18 he's been racing cars since 2020. According to Forix he's already taken part in 128 car races! As well as the testing listed there, I don't know how much off-the-books testing these well-supported drivers get. I saw an interview with Callum Ilott where he said that despite Verstappen going straight from karts to Formula 3, he did still did some massive number like 70 days of testing in an F3 car before that season.

Another factor is that Formula 1 cars have hundreds of people and hundreds of millions of pounds of develpoment in order to make it as easy as possible to get the best lap time out of them. Whereas Formula 2 cars...haven't. The fastest cars aren't necessarily the hardest cars to drive at the limit. That said, it was certainly a good drive in terms of how sensible it was for an 18 year old, I just don't know how impressed we should be about how fast he was.

[MikeTekRacing]

400km at Fiorano, so that's 133 laps in a 2021 car.

31 laps in the Haas in FP1 Mexico 2023.

24 laps in the Haas in FP1 Abu Dhabi 2023

110 laps in the young driver for Haas in Abu Dhabi 2023

Unknown amount of laps at Barcelona in a 2022 Ferrari the 31st of Jan 2024.

 

Then Saudi.

 

Why do I bother taking it literally and listing it up? Because it is more than some people think, it is also way less than what others think.

Cheers, thank you for listing these!

that's really not a lot. 500 laps in 3 different cars, all of them different to the one he actually had to drive.

The 2021 car is super different. The 2022 car is probably the closest one. 

 

 

 

Another factor is that Formula 1 cars have hundreds of people and hundreds of millions of pounds of develpoment in order to make it as easy as possible to get the best lap time out of them. Whereas Formula 2 cars...haven't. The fastest cars aren't necessarily the hardest cars to drive at the limit. 

That is true, but at the same time - how often do experienced drivers struggle with getting the most out of their cars? How often do they really need a "breakthrough" in setup, or getting the car right for their style?

Leclerc struggled a lot last season for instance compared to Sainz - and he had all the time and the resources to help him - yet in Barcelona he was nowhere. 

The F1 cars are not the hardest to drive at the limit, the problem is the other 19 on the grid are not too shabby either...so the bar si super high

[Oulton]

To the original thread question, yes, certainly from a racing perspective. Race pace shouldn't be an issue for a stand-in, he has all the help he needs via telemetry and engineer comms to do a good job (car allowing), all he has to deal with (new) is tyre management and stamina. Qualifying is more of a challenge, initially anyway.