Photo: ACI Sport
As Ollie Bearman makes waves in F1, his younger brother Thomas has followed his footsteps into Italian F4, but has his own distinct objectives
Déjà vu? A black-and-orange Van Amersfoort Racing-liveried Tatuus Formula 4 car. Number 87 on the nose. The name on the cockpit? Bearman.
Five years after brother Oliver stormed to the Italian F4 championship with the crack Dutch team, younger sibling Thomas embarked on his own tilt at the same title at Misano in May.
Like Ollie, Thomas has moved to VAR for his second full season in the category, having finished eighth in the British F4 championship last year with Hitech.
Yet, Thomas is much more than “the brother of…”. He has shown that he is talented and thinking racer who has already impressed the team with his ability to listen to advice from his engineers. Formula Scout sat down with him recently to discuss his objectives for the year.
With the Italian series now limited to circuits within the country’s borders, every venue is new for the English driver. Even his initial taste of European racing in 2024 at the Red Bull Ring is of little value, as the Austrian venue no longer features on either the Italian or E4 calendars.
“I’m not a rookie driver, but it’s also my first time at all of these tracks. So, in some ways, it’s a lot more difficult for me than the guys that raced here last year. But I didn’t see that as a setback.”
Indeed, Bearman is excited by the opportunity to “learn new tracks. The Italian tracks are a bit more forgiving than the British ones, so you drive to the limit of the car rather than the limit of the track, like you do in Britain. At somewhere like Brands Hatch, you’re driving up to the gravel. The tracks are narrow and bumpy, so you’re on the limit of everything.
Photo: Jakob Ebrey Photography
“Tracks like Monza and Mugello are very wide, and even places like Misano are designed for MotoGP, which leads to a different, smoother style of driving. The higher temperatures compared to Britain mean you have to be a lot more tyre-focused than in a 20-minute British race. These are important things that will carry over as you climb the ranks.”
Though the Spanish and British championships have grown in stature, Italy remains the one people want to win, with an illustrious list of champions. “You can put your name at the front in a bigger stage for Italian F4 and that’s really the goal this year,” Bearman says. Entering the Italian series has been “a positive step for me because I’d rather do another year in F4, learn the basics, so that I can carry forward rather than rushing into something and then being behind.”
Swapping teams, whatever the pedigree of the squads involved, is more than just a matter of getting to know new faces, but also a “different car philosophy, which I found out the hard way, so it took a lot of adaptation in that respect. They all go about things in different ways, but no one ever stays in the same team their entire career.
“So, it’s one of those things I had to experience for the first time. It’s the same approach in the end, just done a different way. But I think everything’s gone pretty well.”
VAR has “a lot of knowledge, with so many prestigious drivers across the years, not only my brother, so it’s nice to know you’re going into the series with a team that can fight for the championship.
“I’m really grateful to have a team that listens to you so much and works with you so well. You don’t always get that environment. It provides a lot of growth for me as well, learning so much about what we’ve been doing as a team, because I’ve never been so involved in the car side of things before, which has been a nice change.”
Bearman’s season got off to a tough start as the series kicked off at Misano. After setting the pace in free practice, he and the team ended up going the wrong way in the only qualifying session, leaving him with an uphill fight all weekend. Having fought his way through to a mid-grid starting position for the final, he was extremely fortunate to escape uninjured from a horrific-looking accident as he stalled on the grid and was rammed at speed from behind.
Photo: ACI Sport
“This has probably been the hardest track we’ve gone to, both for me and the car, in terms of finding a nice window.” With the series due to return to Misano later in the year, any lessons learned can be stored and applied later.
“We want to minimise weekends like this where we’re so up and down because obviously it’s not good either for results or for confidence.”
What Bearman certainly didn’t lack was the required mix of aggression, positional intuition and pure racecraft to make progress in his first two races.
“My mum’s here this weekend and she was saying that the last time she was here, my brother won both the races. I was saying, ‘It’s going to be a bit difficult from 15th, but I’ll try.”
And try he certainly did. At a track which encourages single-file racing, Bearman had his elbows out and provided plenty of spectacle as he made his way to the front.
“I knew that I had to take some risks, although, to be honest with you, I didn’t take as much risk as I thought I would, but everything panned out nicely but that’s also a second year experience thing that I can really work on, just knowing where to fill the gap, where to go is really helpful. I did a mega lap one and probably got the car to about the peak of our performance.”
Back on track at Vallelunga for round two, he scored points in all three races as he once again led the VAR challenge to US Racing and Prema.
Having an F1 driver in the family has its advantages, but Bearman is clear that he is his own man with “my own career.”
“I sent Ollie a couple of videos from testing, but I have to work things out for myself, obviously. He’s very helpful to ask general questions but at the end of the day it’s about what I learn myself and how I go about things, because you don’t really learn until you experience things first hand. Obviously, he’s gone through that himself, so he can help to prepare me for some things, but overall, it’s my own development.”
The elder Bearman was Italan F4 champion in 2021
So, the big question: when they’re at home racing on the sim, who is quicker, the F1 driver or the F4 racer?
“It depends actually,” he smiles. “We do have a lot of fun. I think we’re a very similar pace on the sim, which makes it way more fun because you have a lot closer races. The other week we did a four-hour race together, which was a lot of fun. It’s nice to see that the skills that I work on myself can carry over so well to the sim, to the point where I’m the same pace as an F1 driver.”
Obviously, Bearman’s sights are on emulating his brother by winning the championship for VAR. But beyond that he is looking to “polish up a few things in my driving, which is important, especially as you move up the categories. Beyond that, just building confidence through good results that can be carried over into future races and championships. But overall, just to come out a better driver, having worked on all these things that carry over to any series and being a more refined version of myself.”