A notice to all sailors: the sea is calm, not in a storm. It’s not a report looking at the wave motion in the Persian Gulf but expressing the atmosphere in the Ferrari garage after the first day of collective testing in Bahrain.
The blow that Max Verstappen delivered to everyone with the Red Bull RB20 must of course be taken into consideration, but it shouldn’t hurt. Certainly, the gap that the three-time world champion inflicted on the best pursuer did not go unnoticed, but there was no panic in the Maranello team.
Carlos Sainz, who drove in the afternoon, finished in third place on the timesheet: true, with 1’32.584, he finished a 1.2″ behind the Dutch champion, but he’s within a tenth of Lando Norris with the McLaren MCL38, the car most likely to be the top contender for Red Bull.
Certainly, the new Red Bull has raised eyebrows throughout the paddock, but Fred Vasseur’s team, at least for today, remained composed. The work plan that Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz had was clear inside, so there were no surprises. The goal was to discover the characteristics of the SF-24 after the Fiorano filming day.
The drivers were tasked with performing aerodynamic tests for the car mapping, followed by data scanning. A methodical, planned job designed to find all correlations with the wind tunnel and simulation systems. We saw Max Verstappen a lot faster than Charles Leclerc on the straight in the morning session in terms of top speeds, but the Dutchman had opened the DRS, while the Monegasque was running with the closed DRS in a baseline configuration. An utterly uneven duel.
Ferrari chose to run only with the hardest compounds in the available Pirelli range, namely C1 and C3, and there was always a lot of fuel in the tank. From tomorrow, after completing the machine understanding plan, the development phase will begin with the first setup adjustments.
The most important aspect that emerged today is that the SF-24 is much gentler on the tires: Carlos Sainz in his long run saw times decreasing as the fuel on board decreased. Tire wear, a main weakness from last year, seems under control, and even the inherent understeer of the SF-23 seems significantly less pervasive.
The summary of the day for the Maranello team seems positive: 133 laps were covered (64 for Charles Leclerc and 69 for Carlos Sainz), a distance equivalent to over two Grand Prix. Ferrari did not encounter technical problems, so the expectation is that starting tomorrow, direct comparisons with the competition can begin. The Maranello team, for now, can still sleep soundly.
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