A member of the Ferrari driver academy since 2021, he drove in two practice sessions for the Haas team last year, and impressed greatly in both.
Bearman was immediately competitive, but what impressed onlookers just as much was the smooth and mature progress he made.
Haas trackside engineering director Ayao Komatsu – who has been promoted to team principal over the winter – said he “really could not fault” Bearman in his weekend debut in Mexico in October.
That appearance made him the youngest British driver to participate in a grand prix weekend. Now, he has prevented new Ferrari signing Lewis Hamilton, who joins the team in 2025, from becoming the first driver from the United Kingdom to race for Ferrari in F1 since Eddie Irvine in 1999.
At any one time, there are a number of drivers all trying to make it into F1, but very few have a sense of inevitability about them. Bearman, though, is one.
His track record had already marked him out as a potentially special one.
He made his Formula 2 debut last year, and in dominating the weekend at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix became the first driver in the history of the category to top every practice session and win the feature race.
He started karting when he was eight years old, made his single-seater debut in 2020, won both the Italian and German Formula 4 titles in 2021, finished third in his debut season in Formula 3 in 2022 and sixth in F2 last year, when brilliant weekends were punctuated by difficult ones, as is often the case for a rookie.