Members' Club bonus: Ollie Bearman on his rookie season so far - and where he gets his F1 news...

Fresh from a hat-trick of points finishes, and looking every bit as good as Haas and Ferrari thought he would be, Ollie Bearman sat down with Scott Mitchell-Malm in Saudi Arabia for an exclusive interview about his rookie season so far and his approach to F1.

This weekend, we will publish a piece that uses in-depth interviews with the Ferrari protege and his Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu to explore some fascinating details of Bearman's F1 make-up.

As a Members' Club bonus ahead of the full piece running, here's an extract from the start of the Bearman interview, as he reflects on his practice crashes in Australia and how he bounced back quickly to score points immediately afterwards.

But not before an exchange that was music to our ears...

Ollie Bearman: You're with The Race.

Scott Mitchell-Malm: Yes.

OB: Ah cool. The Race is the only actual website that I look at.

SMM: Interview's done! Thank you...I thought this would be a decent chance to take stock of how it's going. How happy are you with how the full rookie season is starting?

OB: I think so far so good. I'm learning and improving my level and making steps where I was aiming to make steps prior to the season. Of course, Melbourne started badly. And I think I can almost forgive myself for the crash in FP1, because they can happen. Of course, they shouldn't be happening in round one, FP1, but they can happen, so I can almost forgive myself for that. But the problem was really the FP3 off, and that was really silly, and that, of course, lost us laps for the entire weekend. So yeah, that was a bad start to the year, and obviously mentally difficult, but I was happy with how I was able to bounce back. And now that's not on my mind in any way anymore. China went really well. A new track for me, sprint race format, and we managed to qualify pretty well on the sprint quali, not as good on the real quali, but having a great race with fantastic race pace. Suzuka, I feel like I executed one of my best weekends. And Bahrain, I think I showed that even with a messy weekend, I had a few problems on the brakes, and I missed FP1, and Bahrain is a tricky track anyway with the differences in temperatures, even on a tough weekend like that, where I didn't get everything out of it, I was still able to do a good race and bring home a point. So it's been up and down but the ups have been good, and I've learned so much sitting here right now.

SMM: What do you think was the cause of what happened in Melbourne? Just too eager to catch up after the FP1 crash?

OB: Honestly not. It's just that the track curves on entry and I dropped a wheel. There's nothing more to it than that. If you look at that lap, I was going really slowly, I was just building up and just a silly oversight really, nothing more than that, nothing that needs to be studied. And that's why it almost hurt more, because there was nothing that I did wrong, I just didn't pay enough attention, and did a clumsy mistake, which always hurts a bit more than when you're calculating a risk and you miscalculate. It wasn't one of those, it was just a silly error. So yeah, it did hurt. And of course, after Friday, to then be in a situation where the car performance is clearly not good in Australia, and to do that was very bad. But let's move on from Australia!

SMM: The grand prix didn't give you much chance there to recover or make amends or anything like that. But then China, next time out, you were strong straight away. How easy did you find it to just park it, move on, get back to performing at the level that we'd seen you perform at?

OB: Yeah, honestly, it wasn't difficult at all, because it wasn't like I had to change anything I was doing. I just had to hold myself back a little, because generally I have a tendency to push and push and push, and sometimes that can result in an error, and it depends on the track, but sometimes that can be more costly than other tracks. And in Australia, if you make a mistake and lose the line, then you hit the wall, that's part of it. So it's not like I had to change anything I was doing. I just had to have a few reminders of myself [like], 'What session I am in at the moment? I'm in FP1. It doesn't matter if I don't execute a perfect lap, because it's only FP1'. And I think part of that was coming from Formula 2, where at the end of the FP1, you need to be all in and fully confident to then put the car on the limit for qualifying. But in F1 we have the beauty of FP1, then we have FP2 and FP3.