Oliver Berman said what helped him gain

      In the last four Grands Prix Oliver Bearman scored 24 points — more than he had in all the previous rounds of the season combined. In Las Vegas the Haas driver said that changes to his approach to working on race weekends helped him make progress.

      “After the summer break I tried to structure the way I work on race weekends differently, to make my approach more structured,” Oliver Bearman says. “Before the summer break I was constantly focused on how to improve my driving and how to improve the car’s setup, to gain five hundredths of a second. I hardly thought about what I was doing before getting in the car and setting a specific goal for each session.

      “Now I try, half an hour before a session starts, to stop working on setups, driving and things like that, and focus on the mental preparation. And I’ve found that this approach helps me.

      “Also, we’ve taken steps in the right direction with the car. Of course it still has limitations, and driving on the limit isn’t that easy. But I already have experience of how the car reacts to different inputs, I can feel the feedback and I know when I’m driving at the limit of the car’s capabilities. I’ve managed to achieve greater consistency both in working with the car and in my approach to race weekends.

      “The first half of the season for me was exploratory, because I was trying to understand which solutions work and which don’t. The key task was to identify the non-working solutions and not repeat them going forward. Yes, perhaps this meant the first half of the season wasn’t very successful, but in two or three years no one will remember it.”