A no longer unbeatable Verstappen still on pole at Sakhir!

(Cover picture: Max Verstappen)

Raise your hand if you would have bet on a pole position for Max Verstappen at the start of this World Championship... Well, honestly everyone would have done it, and - we can say in hindsight - rightly so! But going deeper, we discover that the gap he enjoyed over his rivals throughout the qualifying session of the Bahrain Grand Prix was really small, regardless of the final classification shown below.

The second piece of news of the day is the identity of these rivals: the two Ferraris appear to be the most fearsome for Max to date, but the group of front runners is really large at the start of this season. Mercedes has put on track a car - the W15 - that is currently fast and drivable, Aston Martin in the hands of Fernando Alonso is convincing, and also weighing in were the two McLarens - especially in low track temperature conditions.

So let's analyze what happened!

Verstappen would have been in front even without the slipstream, but Leclerc managed to lose pole!

What took center stage after qualifying was the slipstream that Max enjoyed on the lap that earned him pole. As happened in Q2 with a Haas, in fact, also in Q3 the Red Bull pitwall planned its driver's exit from the pits to ensure that the start of his flying lap coincided with the end of that of another car (Oscar Piastri's Mclaren), of which he would have exploited the slipstream effect guaranteed by the wake.

Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

The plan succeeded perfectly and, telemetry in hand, was worth around 0.130 s to the World Champion: we're talking about just over half the gap (0.228 s) that kept him ahead of Charles Leclerc's Ferrari. This explains why we say that Max would have finished in pole position even without the involuntary help of Piastri's McLaren, but it doesn't clarify where the RB20 made the difference compared to the competition along the Sakhir track.

Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

The answer this time is clear, and refers to Turn 1. In that braking zone (the harshest of the entire circuit) Verstappen even gains more than the entire above-mentioned gap, so it's easy to understand how in the rest of the track Leclerc has regained part of those meters lost, but not enough. The trend was then followed also in the other braking zones of the Sakhir circuit, leaving the doubt as to whether the strong point of this RB20 lies in the braking system or in the front suspension arrangement - which since last year we have known to be the best in class.

Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

The question therefore is: what do we mean by saying that Leclerc managed to lose pole? Well, look at the laptime set by the Monegasque in Q2: 1'29"165, not only faster than his personal best in Q3 (1'29"407), but also than Max's pole time! Why did Charles lose two and a half tenths between Q2 and Q3? It's probably right to "blame" a sub-optimal tyre preparation for the SF-24, which curiously clashes with last year's trend, where the SF-23 immediately "switched on" its tyres.

Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Be careful though: the ease with which the 2023 car brought the tyres to the right temperature was the same with which it caused overheating in the race, leading to a performance drop after a few laps from the start of each stint. The 57 laps of the race will tell us whether we can talk about a real turnaround in this regard, or whether it was an isolated circumstance.

George Russell (in third place) optimizes the result with the package available

The second row sees George Russell's Mercedes, in today's qualifying better than his teammate Hamilton at extracting performance from his W15 - to the point of even finishing ahead of the other Ferrari SF-24 of Carlos Sainz, overall faster but also more inconsistent in the heat of Q3.

Steve Etherington / Motorpsort Images

Russell's P3 is a bit of a surprise if you consider that in Q2 both he and Hamilton managed to get into the top ten with a very small margin, and also by virtue of this it can be said that running a clean qualifying session paid off for the English driver. As for Sainz, on the other hand, the Spaniard paid a high price for a "late breaker" driving style in an attempt to gain laptime in this zones, but losing even more time in the subsequent accelerations. From a race perspective, however, I don't feel like excluding the Ferrari driver from the fight for victory, which - even if I hadn't mentioned it yet - I don't think it will be the usual Verstappen monologue.

Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

In third row the second Red Bull, that of Perez, and the Aston Martin of Fernando Alonso: I consider the result obtained by the Spaniard more valuable than the lap that kept the Mexican driver in fifth position, because during the qualifying Fernando found himself with a set of Soft tyres (of C3 compound) less than its rivals. To recover from this situation of strategic disadvantage, he was therefore able to complete just one run in Q3, moreover in track conditions that weren't at their peak in terms of grip - but at least with temperatures quite comparable to those who went on track a few minutes later, at the tail end of the session.

Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

The next two rows are courtesy of the McLarens of Norris (who made a big mistake in Sector 1 of his best lap) and Piastri, followed in turn by Lewis Hamilton and a surprising Nico Hulkenberg in P10. Delving more into the performance of the German driver, it must be said that since last year Nico has been "towing" his Haas in positions that theoretically wouldn't belong to it (just look at where Magnussen is, despite he certainly cannot be accused of being a poor performance driver...). In 2023, Hulkenberg's extraordinary qualifyings were often followed by anonymous races, where the very high tyre degradation of the old VF-23 didn't allow him to maintain the top ten positions that he had earned with mighty laps on Saturday.

A disappointing RB, but Tsunoda and Ricciardo could make a comeback in the race!

At Visa CashApp RB (or simply RB) I don't think there's much to be satisfied with, especially after three days of very promising pre-season tests. But as we said, test results are often to be taken with a pinch of salt, and Yuki Tsunoda's P11 - together with Daniel Ricciardo's P14 - are the negative demonstration of what has been said...

Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

Not all is lost, however, for the Faenza team: also during the tests we had seen how in race simulation the VCARB 01 suffered from rather limited tyre degradation, and an evidence of this kind is way more difficult to hide. Who knows, maybe in the race this strong point will be able to bring the two drivers of the Red Bull B-team back into the points; on the other hand, given the advantage over the cars starting behind them (Williams, Stake, Haas and Alpine), it will be difficult to fall back.

In closing, a note of blame for Alpine, which this year put a car on track - the A524 - not up to the performance it showed until last season. In the paddock there are rumours of a single-seater with problems of excessive weight and high instability, the latter also clearly visible from the onboards of Ocon and Gasly; I believe, unfortunately for the Enstone team, that it will take a long time to fix these issues!

Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

The 57-lap race will exceptionally be held on Saturday, at 4.00 pm CET. Two-stop strategies are being forecasted, using tyres mainly from the C1 (Hard) and C3 (Soft) compounds: the C2 (Medium) has actually been overlooked by all teams due to the little performance advantage it guarantees compared to the long-lasting Hard compound, also very useful in terms of stategy flexibility. See you tomorrow!

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