Winners and losers from F1®'s Bahrain pre-season test
Monday, 27 February 2023
With Bahrain testing in the books, who's happy – and who has worries – ahead of this weekend's F1® season start?
Blink, and you'll miss it – after three months of no Formula 1® action, the pre-season came and went in a flash in Bahrain last week, with three days of testing preceding the start of the 23-race campaign this weekend in Sakhir.
The usual caveats when assessing pre-season form aside – remember, the timesheets aren't everything – who shone and who stumbled?
Winner: Red Bull Racing
Red Bull picked up from where they left off in 2022 in pre-season testing – if anything, it looks like their advantage over the rest has only increased. Would reigning world champion Max Verstappen play things down? No chance.
"It's been very good," he grinned. "The car is working really well. Just going through a lot of things we wanted to try … just in general enjoying driving the car."
The RB19 is clearly enjoyable to drive – Verstappen's teammate Sergio Perez set the fastest lap of testing with a 1min 30.305secs effort on the final day, two-tenths faster than Charles Leclerc's pole time for Ferrari at the Bahrain race weekend 12 months ago. Verstappen sat 11th on the timesheets but never used the C4 and C5 tyres (the fastest two compounds in Pirelli's range), didn't run on the final day when the track was at its grippiest and did 204 laps with plenty in reserve. Sounds ominous …
Loser: McLaren
Last year's Bahrain test was a disaster for McLaren; Daniel Ricciardo missed it with covid, the brakes repeatedly caught fire, and Lando Norris had to fight a litany of teething problems by himself. This year? Arguably worse, as Norris and Oscar Piastri managed 312 laps between them to leave McLaren with the lowest mileage count (by 41 laps) of any team.
And the pace? Norris was 13th on the 20-driver timesheet, Piastri 19th. The MCL60 spent plenty of time in the garage fixing myriad niggles, and looked an understeer handful when it was on circuit, Piastri's 360-degree spin on the final day at Turn 10 the most dramatic example.
McLaren has admitted it didn't meet its pre-season aerodynamic targets at its launch, and new team principal Andrea Stella had some cautionary words after the test. "Our objective through the season is to be a top-four car," Stella said, adding: "at the moment, we are not necessarily in this range."
Winner: Aston Martin
It's tempting to put Mercedes in this category if only because the W14 driven by Lewis Hamilton and George Russell wasn't akin to a pogo stick with wheels as it was for much of 2022. The 2023 car looks to have dialled out the porpoising that ruined last season. But we'll go with Aston Martin instead, as new signing Fernando Alonso was a standout in a car that might just be the best of the midfield pack so far and looks to have the race pace to trouble Mercedes. Alonso's headline time was nothing special – the Spaniard was ninth overall – but the AMR23 looks and drives very differently to its predecessor, Alonso revelling in the car's sharp corner entry grip. Consider Alonso as a smoky for the Bahrain podium.
Loser: Aston Martin
Aston won and lost in Bahrain? We should specify Lance Stroll, who missed the test after a wrist injury suffered on a bike in a training accident. The timing – when you have a quick car that, let's not forget, your dad Lawrence has bankrolled – wasn't ideal.
Stroll may not be ready for the Bahrain race weekend (or Saudi Arabia two weeks afterwards), and the team's reserve driver Felipe Drugovich pulled his weight to give Alonso some respite, the Brazilian racking up 117 laps in Bahrain. The reigning F2® champion – or the team's other reserve driver, former McLaren racer Stoffel Vandoorne – might need to step in at Sakhir for Stroll. At the same time, Sebastian Vettel's name was thrown into the mix as a stand-in should the Canadian's absence linger.
Losers: The drivers
The drivers as losers after they got back to doing what makes them unique? Just ask them. After three months off, each team's pair of pilots had to share one car for three days of testing ahead of the longest season in F1® history; you could say they're all equally unprepared, but a minuscule pre-season is one of the oddities of F1®.
"I think this is the only sport in the world where you do one day and a half of practice then you play a world championship," suggested Alonso, while Russell had his own take: "Could you imagine Rafa Nadal spending 12 weeks without hitting a ball and then going straight into the French Open with one and a half days of training?" Fair point …
Winner: Lovers of pre-season testing bingo
Ah, testing … where most drivers (not Verstappen, mind you) and team personnel take the Ronan Keating approach to soundbites ("you say it best when you say nothing at all") and keep their cards close to their chests when asked variations of the same question: what's the pre-season pecking order?
We had "in terms of pace, it's really hard to say" (Williams' Alex Albon), "we will continue to focus on ourselves" (Red Bull's head of race engineering Gianpiero Lambiase), "it's the same for everybody" (AlphaTauri rookie Nyck De Vries) and "it's difficult to know where we are in the order" (Hamilton).
Bingo cards checked Bahrain is next – where we'll get a more accurate picture of the state of play for 2023, and where someone will undoubtedly remind us that they'll take it one race at a time, or it's a step-by-step process, or it's a long season ...
