Max Verstappen will start the Bahrain Grand Prix tomorrow from pole position, as he and Sergio Perez locked out the front row for Red Bull ahead of Ferrari, Fernando Alonso and the two Mercedes cars.
Great excitement buzzed around the paddock on Saturday afternoon with growing hype that Fernando Alonso in the Aston Martin may well have been in the mix for pole.
Lance Stroll, his team-mate, also appeared to have good pace – impressive given it’s only been a couple of weeks since a double wrist injury – but it was the Spaniard who was threatening to cause a real surprise and start the campaign on the very front foot.
Indeed, throughout practice here in Bahrain he has been the driver to catch but, when it mattered most during qualifying, fifth place was the best he could achieve with the Red Bull cars too quick for anyone to get near, whilst the Ferrari pair of Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz also edged in front of him.
Post-qualifying, though, Alonso was still naturally very pleased with how things went, with him looking as though he has a great chance of challenging for a podium at least tomorrow in the Grand Prix – especially with the Aston looking good on long runs during practice over the weekend.
“It was amazing,” said Alonso.”The whole weekend has been unreal for us and too good to be true. Our expectation was to be half a second off of Red Bull in qualifying and it was right. It feels so strange for me to say we start P5 and maybe we are aiming for more. We felt the first three teams would be untouchable this year but now we start P5 and we’ll fight Ferrari for a podium. It’s incredible.”
Certainly, it seems as though Aston and Ferrari could well be battling it out for that final spot on the podium, though the Red Bull cars are currently looking a little out of reach for anyone at the start of the season.
Max Verstappen took pole ahead of his team-mate Perez but it sounded as though he did not expect to earn P1 for tomorrow’s Grand Prix. Speaking after the session, the defending double world champion admitted:
“It’s been a bit of a tough start to the weekend yesterday and today, not really finding my rhythm. I was positively surprised to be on pole after the struggles we had in testing.”
Mercedes, meanwhile, saw a slight step forward from Friday which had seen them have a tough couple of practice sessions. Lewis Hamilton had sounded fairly downbeat after FP2 had wrapped up yesterday but, whilst things are clearly not perfect for the Silver Arrows at the moment, he did sound a little bit more upbeat:
“We did some great work overnight,” said Lewis, “the car felt much better this morning.”
In terms of the race tomorrow, the Briton wasn’t sure just where they’ll be in the fight, admitting that the team isn’t certain if they have the same strong long run pace trait that they did in 2022 with the W13. It’s clear they are not where they want to be, however, and the team is well aware they have a lot of work ahead of them to be right back at the sharp end consistently.
Elsewhere, Lance Stroll will start the Grand Prix from P8. The Canadian only experienced the AMR23 for the first time yesterday having missed all of testing following his accident whilst cycling. He said that his wrists were feeling better each day but still couldn’t quite believe the progress that he had made in his recovery.
Completing the top ten, meanwhile, were Esteban Ocon who said the midfield is looking close but perhaps not as close as Alpine would like, whilst Nico Hulkenberg had a great start to his F1 return as he put his Haas in Q3 – he’ll start in P10 tomorrow.
Earlier on in the session, meanwhile, the difficulty of ascertaining the midfield pecking order underlined itself with five different teams being knocked out in Q1.
Pierre Gasly will start from the back of the grid after a track limits infringement chalked off his best time that had had him in P17. He’ll start alongside former employers AlphaTauri with Nyck de Vries in P19, whilst Oscar Piastri goes from P18 alongside Kevin Magnussen – the Dane admitted that he had not quite yet found rhythm with the new Haas car.
Logan Sargeant was eliminated, meanwhile, purely because he set his fastest Q1 time after Lando Norris – the two drivers had set exactly the same lap time but the American was still pleased enough.
Indeed, so too was his team-mate Alex Albon in the other Williams. The Thai-British driver was doing his best to hide how content he was with the car, saying he felt as though he did genuinely have a chance of making Q3.
Albon, though, will instead start from P15 behind Yuki Tsunoda, the two Alfa Romeo cars of Zhou Guanyu and Valtteri Bottas, and the McLaren of Lando Norris.
We have our first grid of the 2023 season, then, and it is Red Bull who have set themselves perfectly to pick up from where they left off in 2022.
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