“Everything went perfect.” That was how Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz summed up the team’s season launch back in mid-February. On that sunny day at Fiorano, Ferrari seemed so confident, so smooth. But barely three weeks later, Charles Leclerc, with Sainz well adrift, had not only been comprehensively defeated at the very Bahrain venue where in 2022 Ferrari had started off with a win, but his new car had let him down too.
As the Formula 1 teams left Bahrain in the wake of Max Verstappen’s first win of an eventual 19, and with a jumbled competitive order behind, the story of the season instead became the question as to whether Red Bull could really win every single race, as Mercedes driver George Russell was soon suggesting.
Testing’s only surprises are behind Red Bull
In what now must be viewed as foreshadowing the year to come, the only problem Red Bull faced in pre-season testing at the Bahrain track, which again hosted the season opener, came via Sergio Perez. The Mexican seemed all at sea during a long run on the second morning, regularly locking up and running off track. But, really, that was it for the reigning constructors’ champion squad. On the final evening of the three-day event, Perez topped the test with a series of one-lap performance runs.
Behind, Aston Martin emerged as the dark horse. An eye-catching late long run even had some forecasting the green team to be bothering Mercedes in the pecking order behind the two leading squads from 2022. That actually turned out to an underestimate. It was soon to be revealed that the 2023 grid was shaped very differently, and this had much to do with Ferrari and Mercedes persevering with the design paths they’d employed to less success than that of Red Bull the year before.
Testing, Leclerc said, had shown that Ferrari was “struggling a little bit more in the corners”, after it had headed Red Bull on the cornering-speed front in 2022. Ominous.
Ferrari falters as Aston surges
The engine electrics issue that had knocked out Leclerc from a
