Bearman's dust-induced Monaco crash and cold-tyre nightmare condemn Haas to Q1 exit

Oliver Bearman qualified 19th at the Monaco Grand Prix after a bizarre Free Practice 3 crash and a yellow-flag interruption in Q1 combined to produce the worst qualifying result of his 2026 Formula 1 campaign.

The Haas driver lost control approaching Massenet corner late in FP3 when his VF-26 hit a dusty patch of tarmac, spinning him into the guardrail and damaging the right-hand side of the car. “I just picked up the dust and lost it,” Bearman said. “It was the strangest crash I ever had — it was so uncharacteristic of the car and everything that had happened that weekend. Suddenly I was facing the wrong way. It was super strange.”

Haas mechanics repaired the car in time for qualifying, and Bearman felt the pace was genuinely there. He was on a lap he believed would have placed him inside the top ten at that stage of Q1 — comfortably enough to advance — when Gabriel Bortoleto’s crash triggered a yellow flag, forcing him to abort the attempt.

The restart proved costly. After a two-and-a-half-minute queue, Bearman was sent out on a new set of tyres without the warm-up preparation he had used throughout the rest of the weekend. “My tyres were kind of 10°C too cold, and I was sliding all over the place for the whole lap,” he explained. Television footage captured a significant slide through the high-speed swimming-pool section. “Just no grip,” he said.

Despite pushing flat-out, Bearman improved by only 0.09 seconds on his final run, leaving him 0.013s short of the Q2 cut-off in 19th place. “I was five tenths down on my best lap into the tunnel,” he said. “I was pushing 110%, giving it everything, because I knew I needed an ‘everything’ lap to get through, but the grip was just nowhere.”

Bearman acknowledged the frustration of a weekend that had shown genuine promise. “I really think we had what it takes to be fighting on the verge of Q3 today, and obviously qualifying is where it counts,” he said. “The guys did such a good job to get the car back together and it was feeling great in quali, so it’s a shame.”