He seized the moment. Valtteri Bottas thrust his Alfa Romeo down the inside of Sergio Perez’s Red Bull at Bahrain’s downhill, Turn 8 hairpin, just after the pair had gone three-wide with Lando Norris in his McLaren at the first corner. Bottas’s bravery paid off. He was ahead, with the chequered flag almost in sight, and yet free to charge off after the leader: AlphaTauri’s Yuki Tsunoda.
How Formula 1 would wish that the varied teams contesting this small spot of ‘racing’, which concluded the final day of 2023 pre-season testing, makes up the pecking order for the real campaign about to get under way at the same Sakhir circuit this Sunday. It would certainly hark back to the lofty aims of the returning ground-effects rules reset. But this was just a flash of orchestrated group running; the cars were actually testing F1’s safety car restart procedures with the championship’s timing and tracking systems. The likely true order of car performance is seemingly startlingly close to how things ended in 2022, albeit with a couple of significant revisions in the midfield.
There’s no getting away from it. After topping two of the three days (only Zhou Guanyu’s late C5 soft-tyre effort for Alfa on day two stopped a clean sweep) and with the fastest overall time, plus solid reliability and long-run pace, Red Bull is comfortably favourite.
Perez’s 1m30.305s led the way in the performance runs that closed out the final day, in conditions closest to the qualifying session for the upcoming Bahrain Grand Prix, albeit using C4 soft Pirellis that won’t be used this weekend. That time was 1.4 seconds quicker than Max Verstappen’s test-topping lap from 2022, and 0.25s up on Charles Leclerc’s pole time for Ferrari 12 months ago.
Perez produced a series of one-lap efforts in the final two hours of the last day, after Red Bull had largely eschewed the softer rubber for most of the test. Indeed, Verstappen’s first-day-leading and
