By Peter Habicht
Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez gave Red Bull a front row start for tomorrow’s Bahrain Grand Prix, the 2023 FIA Formula One World Championship opener. Against general expectations, the field was quite closely bunched, with four different teams managing to get at least one car in the top six. The Ferraris of Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz will start from the second row of the grid, Leclerc dropping behind Pérez after opting to keep the final fresh set of soft tyres for the race, while Fernando Alonso put his Aston Martin AMR23 on the fifth spot, beating the Mercedes’ duo of George Russell and Lewis Hamilton. Alonso’s team mate, Lance Stroll was eighth quickest, while Alpine’s Esteban Ocon and Haas’ Nico Hulkenberg completed the top ten
Q1 had barely begun, with a handful of cars out on track, when Leclerc’s Ferrari lost part of the right front wheel arch along the pit straight, bringing out a red flag to stop the session.
At the restart, the entire field rushed onto the track and the lap times started to drop quickly: Verstappen set the pace at 1m31.295s, followed by Alonso at 1m31.158s, Charles Leclerc at 1m31.094s, George Russell with a 1m31.057s and finally Carlos Sainz taking a 1m30.993s in rapid fire succession.
Further down, Pierre Gasly, Nyck de Vries, Nico Hulkenberg, Lando Norris, Oscar Piastri, Logan Sargeant and Lance Stroll – who had his first lap time deleted after exceeding track limits – were in the danger zone , but the German and the Canadian managed to get themselves into Q2 with their late efforts. That left Gasly and Magnussen in the company of the three rookies as the Q1 dropouts, with Williams’ man Sargeant actually setting an identical time to Norris’, missing out on P15 as the McLaren had set completed his laps a few seconds before him. The American took the positives from this first qualifying experience, saying that, “I’ve laid a good foundation for myself to build on, the pace is there so we just need to start minimizing mistakes and capitalizing what what we already have achieved.”
Alpine driver Gasly was less certain about his result in P20, explaining that, “until FP3 everything looked pretty good, and then going into qualy, I don’t have the answers yet, but I struggled massively. It was a completely different car balance than I had in practice.” Following the session Gasly also received a 100 Euro fine for exceeding the pitlane speed limit by 0.6 km/h.
Q2 saw Leclerc fastest followed by Verstappen with Mercedes’ Russell and Hamilton just ahead of Sainz. The knockout round relegated Norris, Valtteri Bottas, Guanyu Zhou, Yuki Tsunoda and Alex Albon to the midfield, with Albon abandoning his run midway due to front wing damage having run wide on the exit of Turn 4.
As Q3 started, the track was starting to cool down but only the four drivers with two new sets of soft tyres still available, plus Lance Stroll made an early run, while the Russell, Hamilton, Alonso, Ocon and Hulkenberg did their runs a bit out of sequence, trying to get a clear track.
Verstappen quickly set the fasted time of 1m29.708s, and Perez with a 1m29.846s, followed by Leclerc at 1m30.000s and teammate Sainz with a 1m30.154s lap.
Alonso’s time of 1m30.336s put him just ahead of the Mercedes duo of Russell with a 1m30.340s and Hamilton with a 1m30.384s lap. In an impressive start to his first complete F1 season since 2019, Hulkenberg set a time of 1m31.055s until stewards noted he had exceeded track limits. Having used all of his tires for the session and guaranteed a top 10 start, he retired early from the rest of qualifying.
Ferrari opted to keep Leclerc’s car in the garage rather than trying to beat Verstappen for pole, with a better race strategy in mind. The plan was to save a set of soft tires for tomorrow’s race, which could be good for a quick start and estimated to be worth between 0.5-1 second per lap in the early part of the race. After qualifying, Team Principal Frederic Vasseur explained this had been part of the run plan, and felt the session ran smoothly, as the gap to Red Bull was at around 0.1s, much smaller than the Scuderia had feared it would be: “We are there now, [no matter] the gap, you have to be in front…[but] I think on the long runs Red Bull was a bit better than us yesterday.”
