Bruno Michel on Oliver Bearman’s F1 promotion and how the F2/F3 Pyramid continues to prepare talent for the top

It has been a very interesting year for young drivers on the cusp of Formula 1 as the spotlight has never been brighter on the junior talent aiming for their chance at the very top of motorsport.

Formula 2 and 3 CEO Bruno Michel is the latest guest on the F1: Beyond the Grid podcast and discussed just how impressive the drivers have been in 2024, paying special tribute to F1-graduate-to-be, Oliver Bearman.

With the Briton’s Haas F1 Team deal confirmed for 2025, Michel says that it was no surprise that he was handed the drive after his exploits in 2023 and stunning late-notice F1 debut in Jeddah earlier this year.

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“For a young driver like that, it’s always quite a big gamble,” Michel explained on Beyond the Grid. “They go there suddenly, especially after he’d done Free Practice with us, and he was on Pole. Then suddenly, Fred (Vasseur) called me and said, ‘I’m going to take your driver,’ it was a big thing.

“I must say that I knew Ollie had the quality to do well, but you have to be extremely strong in your head to arrive so suddenly and to be able to deliver. That’s where you don’t know. I knew how fast Ollie can be, how strong he can be. Last year he had a couple of weekends – the weekend he did in Baku was absolutely amazing – so I knew the quality of Ollie, there’s no doubt about how strong he can be.

“But then showing what he did that weekend with Ferrari, it was absolutely amazing and it’s fantastic because it’s a good credit to him and for us in terms of preparation, and I was so happy to see that. Ollie is a great driver, there’s no doubt about that.”

Bearman was fighting for rookie of the year honours in 2023, only just missing out to rival Victor Martins but returned in 2024 with a point to prove.

Having secured Pole Position in Jeddah, he instead lined up on the grid sat in the Ferrari SF-24 over his PREMA Racing F2 machine, something Michel had no doubt he was able to handle based on what he’d learned with his opportunities with Ferrari in their driver academy along with experiences in F2.

“I was sure that the environment would be the best for him to perform. After that, the rest is up to him. The driver is the one in the car and it’s up to him. It would have been better if he’d done FP1 or many things could have been done differently, but the fact is it was like this, you don’t say no to an opportunity like that one.

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“He did fantastically well, and I was extremely happy because he showed that in this kind of situation, that he’d never been in before, he was performing, and he was performing quite well. So that’s another level that he reached out of it. You always think he can do it but as long as he hadn’t done it, you don’t know, but he was a great example and I’m so happy for him.”

Expanding on how F1 teams have taken a proactive approach to signing and nurturing talent as part of driver academies, Michel says that it has been clear since the very beginning that drivers benefit from the extensive preparation on offer.

With the level of competition so high now in the Championships that lead to F1, the talent of the drivers continues to grow year on year.

“It makes it easier. The Formula 1 teams’ academies – it’s something I started at Renault 25 years ago with Fernando, Jarno, Mark Webber, Fisichella, Kovalainen - we put a lot of drivers in Formula 1 at that time.

“Quite a lot of other teams followed that path and started their own academies. It’s great. It’s fantastic to have, half of the F2 grid is coming from an F1 academy and it’s giving them much more exposure.

“When a Red Bull or Alpine driver is doing well for example, the exposure is bigger. They also have much more preparation. They have more capacities of doing simulator work, all these things they can do which is helping them at the end of the day.

“It’s very good, a plus, and we’re so happy to be closer to Formula 1 than we were at the beginning.”

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In order for the drivers to make the required impact in F1 though when opportunity does arise, extensive work has gone into building a Championship that prepares drivers in the right way for what comes next.

While driving on the same circuits on Grand Prix weekends is a good start, it’s actually the granular details that have become more of an emphasis as the Formula 2 Championship has evolved.

The introduction of the 2024 F2 car for this season has coincided with the most up-to-date FIA standards of safety mechanisms and regulations, paired with F1-esque DRS and electronic systems to better prepare drivers for what they’ll experience in their futures.

Michel notes that it is a conscious effort to design the systems, cars and Championship in a way that tests the drivers' abilities across a wide ranging spectrum of skills, from tyre management to working with the teams out of the cars too.

“We have to make it as simple as possible, but we also have to make it as high performance as possible. That’s the balance we have to find. We have to find cheap ways to do complicated things.

“We have a DRS that is extremely efficient in Formula 2 but it’s working very differently to how it works in Formula 1 with DRS. It’s a very simple system, and that’s the kind of thing we’re always trying to do – have a car that’s as close as possible to a Formula 1 car, not only in terms of performance but also in terms of systems, working with the electronics and marshalling systems, race control. We’re using the same systems as they do in Formula 1, but we’re trying to make it cheaper because we have a real issue otherwise that drivers won’t be able to sustain the costs of a season. So, it’s something we always need to be extremely careful about.

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“We need to have a car that can overtake and overtake as much as possible. I have to say so far that the F2 car this season has been absolutely amazing.

“In Bahrain we had fantastic races, in Melbourne we had fantastic races and in Monaco – our Feature Race in Monaco we had 26 overtakes, which is something quite incredible for Monaco, the race was amazing.

“That’s really what we’re trying to do and to achieve and it’s a thin balance. But we’re working on that, and we’ve been doing that for a little while so have a bit of experience”