Photo: Prema
Ollie Bearman will, as has long been anticipated, stay with Prema in Formula 2 next year but will be without his engineer from his rookie season.
The Ferrari junior won four races this year, a tally bettered only by team-mate Frederik Vesti, and came sixth in the standings.
He also claimed three poles, which nobody else bettered, and made test and free practice appearances in Formula 1 with Ferrari and Haas. Bearman expects he will get more F1 mileage in 2024, with Haas publicly stating it wants to run him.
“I’m really happy to be joining Prema again in F2. I’ve come a long way as a driver and as a person these two years thanks to them, and I’m excited to continue the work we have been doing into next season,” said Bearman.
It will be his third campaign with the Italian team, having joined them in the FIA Formula 3 Championship last year and come third in the standings with one win.
“It is great to have Ollie back with us for another year after the great seasons he had with us so far,” Prema’s team principal Rene Rosin commented.
“The way he adapted, improved, and developed is outstanding, and we cannot wait to see what this progress will take us further down the road. We also think that the experience he had this year will help him and the team in adapting to the new car. It’s definitely going to be an interesting and promising experience.”
Bearman’s chief race engineer in 2023 was Antoine Okla, who has a long and impressive CV in junior single-seaters. He was a race engineer for ART Grand Prix’s GP3 squad from 2010 to ’13, then at DAMS was performance engineer to Jolyon Palmer when he won the 2014 GP2 title.
He later worked on the cars of Pierre Gasly, Alex Lynn and Alex Albon in the series, which became F2 in 2017, and Prema signed him in 2019. The first driver he worked with for the Italian outfit was Mick Schumacher, serving as race engineer during his rookie campaign then having his job title changed to chief race engineer for the next two seasons.
Okla won the title in each of those, first with Schumacher and then with Oscar Piastri, and when Prema expanded into sportscars last year in the LMP2 prototype category he held the same role for the car that won the European Le Mans Series and finished second in class at the Le Mans 24 Hours.
After one year back in F2, Okla left Prema a few weeks ago to reunite with Piastri at McLaren, where he will be one of the team’s trackside tyre performance engineers in F1.
Bearman’s 2024 team-mate will be Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who is jumping up the single-seater ladder after winning the Formula Regional Europe Championship. Prema has also moved Alexis Cigrand, who was its chief race engineer in FREC, up to F2 for next year to be a race engineer in the series.
Pedro Matos engineered Prema’s other F2 car, driven by Frederik Vesti, during 2023.