Motor racing-Bearman to race for Haas in 2025, four Britons on the F1 grid
By Alan Baldwin
SILVERSTONE, England, July 4 (Reuters) -British teenager Oliver Bearman will race for Haas next season after signing a multi-year deal, the U.S.-owned Formula One team announced on Thursday ahead of his home Grand Prix at Silverstone.
Bearman's arrival will give Britain four drivers on the starting grid, a fifth of the total.
The 19-year-old Ferrari reserve will be on track at Silverstone on Friday afternoon for the first free practice session before handing the car back to Kevin Magnussen for the rest of the weekend.
It will be the Formula Two driver's third such outing with the team in 2024.
Bearman made a memorable F1 race debut aged 18 with Ferrari in Saudi Arabia last March as stand-in for Spaniard Carlos Sainz, who was sidelined by appendix surgery, and finished an impressive seventh.
That made him the third youngest racer in Formula One history, as well as the youngest Briton, and he is still 14th in the 2024 F1 standings and ahead of the Alpine, Williams and Sauber drivers as well as Magnussen.
"It's hard to put into words just how much this means to me," said Bearman, who will join McLaren's Lando Norris, Mercedes's George Russell and Ferrari-bound Lewis Hamilton on the grid.
"To say out loud that I will be a Formula One driver... makes me so immensely proud. To be one of the very few people who get to do the thing that they dreamed of as a child is something truly incredible."
Haas use Ferrari engines and Bearman has been part of the Italian team's academy since November 2021, a path also taken in the past by Charles Leclerc and Michael Schumacher's son Mick, who debuted with Haas.
The Briton won the 2021 Italian F4 and ADAC F4 championship and moved up to Formula Three in 2022 before his F2 debut in 2023, where he finished sixth overall with four wins.
Last weekend in Austria he took his first victory of the season in an F2 sprint race.
Haas team boss Ayao Komatsu said Bearman had become "an incredibly mature driver" and the world had seen that during the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, where he was called up at the last minute.
"Oliver proved he was more than ready for the task and we've seen that for ourselves running him in the Haas cars in our FP1 sessions over the past two seasons," he added.
Haas have yet to confirm their second seat, currently occupied by Magnussen whose German team mate Nico Hulkenberg has already been announced as a Sauber driver for 2025.
Haas are seventh of the 10 teams in the championship after 11 rounds.
Reporting by Alan Baldwin, editing by Clare Fallon
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