The first day of practice in Bahrain offered a lot of interesting talking points, from McLaren’s dominant performance to Ferrari’s first updates of the season. The team led by Andrea Stella showed off a very strong performance in FP2, proving that their MCL39 is a very versatile car. Behind, Mercedes, Ferrari and Verstappen are all close to each other, as a tough battle is expected tomorrow. Let’s try to analyse what happened today.
McLaren miles in front of other teams
Starting from McLaren, they had one of the best Fridays since the beginning of the season, with a dominant performance over the rest of the top teams. The MCL39 looked extremely well balanced especially in the slow speed and in medium speed corners, gaining a huge amount of time in the second Sector to their rivals.
One ability that could be appreciated today was the car’s ability to run very close to the ground but with a soft enough mechanical set-up. This is quite surprising, as when the suspension system is kept soft and the car is too close to the ground, it starts experiencing problems like bouncing, thus losing performance.
However, McLaren’s engineers led by Rob Marshall have found a way that allows the MCL39 to run very low to the ground but also with quite soft set-ups. This inevitably gives an advantage in all kinds of corners: thanks to the high level of downforce generated by the Venturi channels, the car is particularly strong in high speed and medium speed corners.
Moreover, the additional downforce generated is helpful in tyre management, especially on those layouts where the tyre wear is high. The performance in the slow corners is guaranteed by the soft set-up, meaning that McLaren is slower than competitors only in the straights, due to the high level of downforce generated.
All these aspects combined, made the MCL39 elusive on Friday in Bahrain, with half a second gap to Russell in P3 during the qualifying simulations and a similar gap in the average lap times during the race pace simulations, as underlined in the table below.
By now, the only thing that could stop McLaren would be starting behind other cars: in fact, the MCL39 has shown way higher levels of downforce than competitors, which translate into a lower top speed. This should not be a problem if Norris and Piastri lock out the front row in qualifying, but could represent a big trouble if they qualify behind some other drivers, as their poor top speed should make overtaking way more difficult.
Ferrari with a whole new floor
Moving on to analyse Ferrari’s performance, the Maranello team was the one of the only teams to bring updates in Bahrain, with a completely new floor. As shown in the images below, the changes concentred all floor components, from the floor fences to the diffuser.
Starting from the floor fence, the outer floor edge has been slightly changed at its connection to the main floor element, with the two pointed elements that have been moved further inside, probably to manage differently the flow and vortices directed towards the floor edge wing (light blue arrow). Moreover, the yellow dotted line and arrow show off the new design of one of the floor fences: the upper edge, which extends above the ceiling of the floor, now has a more pointed, serrated shape, mainly to improve the efficiency of the vortices and differently influence the air passing through the undercut.
For what concerns the floor edge, a new vortices generator has appeared and has a very similar design and shape to the other two placed just in front (green arrows). This change has probably been made to make this component work together with the changes made to the floor fences and diffuser and mainly aims at pushing outside the front tyre turbulence and generate vortices to seal off the floor itself.
However, the SF-25 performance today was characterised by highs and lows: the car didn’t seem unbalanced or difficult to drive, but it just lacked performance, meaning that Ferrari was just slower than McLaren. Leclerc after the race underlined that “the upgrades worked as they hoped”, but they haven’t fully understand the potential of the package yet, which can be unlocked with even more work done at the simulator tonight.
As shown in the table above, the race pace simulations weren’t particularly bad, especially from Leclerc on the medium tyre, meaning that with a bit of work the Maranello based team could be the second quickest behind McLaren, but in front of Mercedes and Verstappen. For sure they’ll have to favour qualifying, since they need to start as further up as possible to export their real potential.
Mercedes and Red Bull with a more difficult Friday
For what concerns Mercedes, they had a decent day as well, thanks to one of the W16 biggest strength: traction. The solid rear end made Antonelli and Russell have a very good grip out of all slow corners and a good top speed at the end of all straights, mainly due to the very unloaded rear wing.
However, one big problem for them could be represented by the high temperatures and the thermal degradation of the rear tyres, a weakness of this year’s car. Not by accident, in fact, both drivers seemed very competitive in the qualifying simulations, where the high grip offered by the soft tyre covers some car’s weaknesses, which instead were exposed during the race pace simulations.
On contrast on what said about McLaren, if Mercedes’ drivers are able to qualify in a good spot tomorrow, they could be very difficult to overtake due to the very efficient set-up, resulting in a very difficult race for drivers behind.
Last but not least, Red Bull had a difficult day in Bahrain: the RB21 looked very slow and difficult to drive, both in qualifying simulations and race pace sims as well. As often happened during these first few races of the season, the Milton Keynes engineers have run a “base” set-up (the one found at the simulator before the weekend started) that was completely wrong, both for Verstappen and especially for Tsunoda.
As a consequence, the team will need to do some extra hard work tonight to give an answer to their lack of performance and find a set-up that could make the car enter its working window, which seems to be particularly tight and difficult to enter this season. If a series of factors align and the team finds the right set-up, the car could enter it, as happened in Japan, but as soon as the RB21 exits this window, becomes very difficult to drive and very slow. If a right set-up isn’t found for tomorrow, then a difficult weekend is expected for Red Bull, as they seem to suffer the hot temperature and high tyre wear.
In conclusion, a lot of teams haven’t found the right set-up yet, thus the scenario tomorrow could be completely different. A good weekend of racing has just started, but with the changes of set-up expected overnight, both Ferrari and Verstappen could gain lap time on McLaren, making qualifying a bit more enthusiastic, but we just need to wait to see how the weekend will develop.
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