SAKHIR, Bahrain — A couple of days ago, Max Verstappen winning the opening race of the Formula One season seemed like sport’s surest bet. Many went further, believing Red Bull’s performance in preseason testing seemed strong enough to write off the season entirely and name Verstappen a four-time world champion.
The opening three practice sessions of the new season combined with Friday’s qualifying session painted a much closer competitive picture between Red Bull and its closest rivals, though. Although it’s true that Verstappen took his 33rd career pole position by more than 0.2 seconds on Friday, at no point during the hour session did the result seem like a foregone conclusion.
The top six drivers were split by less than 0.4s, with five teams featuring in the top eight. Every one of them seemed to have an explanation for why a tenth of a second slipped away here or there, with the end result much closer than any of them expected.
Charles Leclerc, who secured second place on the grid, actually set the fastest time of the evening when he clocked a 1:29.165 in Q2 — 0.014s faster than the time that eventually secured Verstappen pole position in Q3. Leclerc believes a repeat would have been possible in Q3 had Ferrari managed their use of soft tyres throughout the session differently and given him two shots on fresh tyres in Q3 rather than one.
“I think it’s closer than what it looks on the time sheets, but this is a good thing,” Leclerc said. “We were expecting Red Bull to have a bit more margin than what there was today, so we are a bit closer than what we thought.
“But the biggest question mark is obviously tomorrow in the race. I’m pretty sure they have a bit more margin than what we’ve seen today. But again, let’s wait and see.”
Leclerc’s refusal to get too excited is prudent. Last season he took three of the last five pole positions of the year only for Verstappen to take victory in all of the final five races. Throughout last year, Red Bull’s ability to look after its tyres in race conditions allowed its drivers, specifically Verstappen, to maintain a faster pace while running on heavy fuel than its rivals.
As close as qualifying looked on Friday, the race (Saturday, 9:55 a.m. ET; stream live on ESPN) could still be a very different story. Thursday’s practice saw Mercedes emerge as the fastest car outright on the time sheets, but when the teams simulated race conditions with heavy fuel over multiple laps, it was Red Bull that looked fastest.
Across 14 laps, Verstappen averaged a lap time of 1:36.7, while Leclerc could manage only 1:37.1 over 12 laps. George Russell, who qualified third for Mercedes on Friday, looked marginally quicker than the Ferrari with an average of 1:37.0 over 12 laps.
Those times don’t take into account setup changes made since practice and come with the usual caveats around fuel loads and engine settings, but the advantage held by Verstappen backed up the belief that Red Bull still holds an advantage over the rest.
“Let’s wait until the race,” Leclerc’s teammate, Carlos Sainz, said after qualifying fourth. “That’s where they suddenly level it up and they manage to have degradation no one can have and race pace no one can have.”
Russell added: “I think we all knew it was going to be very close [in qualifying] between ourselves, Ferrari, Aston Martin, McLaren and Checo [Sergio Pérez], and I think the gap in qualifying today was probably slightly closer to Max than we expected. But I think race pace is the important one and we are expecting probably a 0.5s deficit; that’s what we thought after testing, but we’ll see tomorrow.”
Verstappen, who was sat next to Russell in the news conference when the Mercedes driver made his race pace prediction, immediately pulled an expression of genuine surprise at his rival’s pessimism.
“Half a second?!” Verstappen asked.
“Is that too small?” Russell responded.
“No, I think it’s way too big,” Verstappen replied. “But if you say that now, then it is better tomorrow.”
Perhaps taking his own advice, the defending champion played down the ease with which a 55th career victory would come on Saturday, referencing his own reading of race simulations in testing and practice sessions.
“We’ve done quite a few long runs now, to the point where you almost get bored of it,” he said. “But yeah, I’m confident that we have a good race car. But I think also what you saw already yesterday in the long runs, the gaps are small, and it’s about attention to detail that will make the difference also tomorrow.”
The truth, as is often the case, probably lies somewhere in between, but there remain enough unanswered questions going into the first race to make things interesting.
