Oliver Bearman will contest Sunday’s Sao Paulo GP as well as the Saturday sprint for Haas after the ill Kevin Magnussen was ruled out for the rest of the weekend.
Under the regulation the Dane could have returned to do qualifying and Sunday’s main race, but team and driver decided that the correct course of action was to stick with Bearman.
“I spoke to Kevin after qualifying,” Komatsu told formu1a.uno. “He still sounded very, very rough. And then Kevin from his side said to me himself even if he feels better, it doesn’t make sense for him to drive.
“He messaged me to tell me that. I said, Look, Kevin, that’s what I was going to tell you. So we are completely aligned on that one.”
Although Magnussen felt ill on Thursday Komatsu was confident that he would be fit to drive on Friday.
“Yesterday morning he was fine,” he said. “But by lunchtime or mid-morning, he wasn’t feeling well, so he went back to the hotel. But this has happened before.
“So I thought nine out of 10 times he would be okay this morning. But then got a text message from his physio. He didn’t sleep much last night at all. Throughout the night he wasn’t good.”
Komatsu said he didn’t want to tell Bearman on Thursday that he might be racing only for it to be a false alarm.
“I didn’t want to create too much emotion,” he said. “Because honestly, this is not the first time Kevin had this, and then every time he drove, so I thought he’d be okay.
“But then I pre-warned Ferrari this is happening, so there is a chance that we have to ask for Ollie tomorrow morning.
“But it was a bit of a surprise to me that his situation got worse. Just before I went to bed, I had an update that he’s getting better, so I said here you go. It’s normal sketch. But it wasn’t.”
Bearman was told around 6am that he was driving. He was in Brazil primarily as Ferrari reserve, and thus had some homework to do on Friday morning.
“Ollie had the minimum preparation,” said Komatsu. “I asked him to come in earlier, he sat down with the engineers, making a run programme etc, seat check, everything. There was no issue whatsoever.
“And he’s just drove so impressively, the capacity he’s got. Amazing. He hadn’t done a simulator session for here with Ferrari, I think he did Interlagos a long time ago, but nothing really relevant.
“Then FP1 he goes out, first timed lap, I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It’s like, how can you do this? He’s just impressive every time we put him in a car and we work together. I’m just wow, it’s amazing.”
Bearman sailed through the first two sprint qualifying sessions in seventh place, and Komatsu believes he would have had the pace to beat George Russell to sixth in SQ3.
However there was an issue with the tyre blanket control system, and he ran wide on cold tyres. With his lap deleted he had to settle for 10th.
