Bahrain Grand Prix Review || F1 2023

00:00

: 2023

00:22

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Steward’s Office. I’m Saira and today we're gonna be talking about the Bahrain Grand Prix.

00:33

was the first race weekend of: 2023

01:02

The race weekend started off with the news that Lance Stroll was going to be racing in Bahrain. He’d had medical checks done after being in an accident during the preseason on his bike. And the FIA had signed off on him being able to come back and to race. So, he flew out to Bahrain after missing the three days of testing.

01:25

With that in mind, he was a driver that was definitely going to need that time on track but FP1 didn’t exactly go smoothly for him. He ended up spending a fair bit of time in the garage since his ignition wasn’t working which just must have been so frustrating for him.

01:46

On top of that you could tell there was still some discomfort in his wrists. There were radio messages between him and his engineer and his engineer was basically just giving him advice on the things that he could do to improve his lap time. And Lance was like, look I just can't do this My wrists won't let me. Even though he knew it would improve his lap time, he just didn't have that give with his wrists and turning the steering wheel in a way that would actually improve those times for him.

02:14

I don’t know. Do I think he would have benefitted from another week off? Well, two weeks by the time the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix comes around… Definitely. By the time the race came around on Sunday, it would have only have been two weeks since he had come out of surgery for his wrists and that seems insane to me.

02:37

To be racing a car for 57 laps under that amount of pressure, insane amounts of g force, working the steering wheel as much as you have to because an F1 steering wheel takes so much more effort to turn. I don't know, guys. It just seems like a lot to handle.

03:01

I mean let's be honest here, for the day-to-day person, I don’t think a doctor would recommend for you to do anything like that coming out of surgery. But athletes don’t exactly do well at being told they can’t compete and that they should sit back and rest. No athlete wants to do that. They want to be out there and they want to be competing.

03:20

Honestly, I do wish someone, anyone, would have just gotten him to take this week off. I just think it's going to benefit him a lot more in the long run to have healed and recovered to have had those extra two weeks, than pushing himself to get back in the car this quickly. I hope overall that he isn’t prolonging his recovery time by doing this or causing any further injury but of course, it lovely seeing him back in the paddock at the same time.

03:50

The Aston in general seemed like the strong car that it was during testing. Alonso seemed to be extracting the most out of that car compared to Lance and I wasn’t really expecting Lance to be close to him right now in the season. Considering that he has two injured wrists and missed out on three days worth of testing. But I think both of them had pretty strong practice sessions.

04:14

There is one thing that I saw in testing that I absolutely have to mention because I saw a really interesting rear wing from Ferrari. They tried to run a single-beam rear wing during FP1. And let’s just say… it wasn’t the most stable. I have never seen a rear wing wobble side to side so much before. I don’t think it’s what Ferrari wanted it to do, because aerodynamically, that must be a nightmare to deal with.

04:50

They did end up switching back to the double-beam rear wing which is a lot more stable for them and did the job a lot better. Didn't wobble from side to side which is always good news. But I am gonna be interested to see if it’s something that makes a comeback later on in the season. Maybe they’ll go back to Maranello with any data they’ve collected on it and try to figure out what’s going on there. I don't think we're necessarily going to see the return of a wobbly rear wing but maybe a single-bean rear wing instead. But it was definitely an interesting sight to see.

05:26

I wasn’t expecting practice to be the most interesting thing though. Mainly because a lot of them were still trying to hide what the car was capable of. A lot of the teams still weren't running at full capacity and full pelt. So, there wasn't a whole load to glean from practice. Quali though was when we really got into it.

05:47

I legit forgot how nervous I get before a quali session. Like, it's not as nervous as I get before a race start because I know that there's less of a chance of crashes and things like that happening in quali. But honestly... first quali of the season and I just wanted to know where the drivers and the teams were actually going to end up. And the results? Well... they weren't completely surprising to be honest.

06:13

Ferrari had definitely been holding back a little during practice and we saw them have quali pace that we hadn’t seen in during testing or the free practice sessions. They were way more competitive for pole than what they had let on but by the sounds of it, I’m not sure even Charles had fully expected them to be able to even try and compete for pole position. So, I don't know whether they were sandbagging beforehand or whether they just genuinely didn't know what the pace was going to be like when the engine modes went up. They managed to lock out the second row which is a really solid result for Ferrari. Both of the drivers though had a pretty tricky start to quali.

06:59

I mean they had started by going out on Mediums and I can’t lie, I did have to do a double take when I saw that come up on the app. But when I thought about it, it did make some more sense. I think Ferrari had a lot of faith in their lap time or at least some hope that they would be able to make it into the top 15 with their mediums and be able to save an extra set of softs for either later on in quali or for the race

07:27

But let’s be honest, Q1 ended up being a little bit of a mess for Ferrari. Charles started his fast lap and we immediately saw a part of his car come flying off. So after that and then locking up into turn 1, he completely abandoned that lap and came into the pits. And then a little while after, the debris that came off of his car caused a red flag and the session

stopped with 13 minutes left on the clock.

07:59

Carlos managed to set a lap time before that red flag but that ended up being deleted since he had a track limits violation. And that was the last we saw of the medium tyres from Ferrari. That must have been a little gutting for them though, to not really get to run those medium tyres properly and the way they probably wanted to. But the res tof quali did go a fair bit better for them. They looked like they were into a fight for pole which seemed to surprise Charles as well as the rest of us. But once again, I can't lie, Ferrari looked like it had a really strong car for one lap pace and managed a second-row lockout.

08:37

it. Who would have thought in: 2023

09:25

Elsewhere in quali though, we have an absolutely phenomenal performance from Nico Hulkenberg in the Haas. He managed to get that car in q3, didn’t set a time but still was starting from 10th on the grid. It was kind of reminiscent of Kevin’s comeback last year for me but the Haas wasn’t an easy car to get a read on in quali since Kevin ended up qualifying in 17th. I think I’m going to have to see Haas in a few more quails to see what’s going on there and how that car actually does with one lap pace.

10:03

Pierre did not have the best of qualis and when you compare it to Esteban who ended up in 8th, that Alpine definitely has some performance in it. But Pierre ended up in 20th. He had a lap time deleted though and he said himself after qualifying, that there was some work to do for him. I think more than anything, it’s just getting used to the car. He’s driven in the AlphaTauri for years now and he now almost has to unlearn what he’s known for so long to try and gel with a brand-new car philosophy. So, I definitely think we’re going to be seeing better quails from him.

10:41

And then to absolutely no surprise, Red Bull managed a front-row lock out. I mean, was anyone really surprised by this? Q1, was a little lairy for them though and left me with a couple of questions since we had Checo in P10 and Max in P7. What I think was the issue for them though was that they had come out on a set of soft new tyres and had put a heat cycle through them on a slow lap and then the red flag came out. So, their tyres weren't in an optimal condition when they went out again. They had two slow laps on them before they were actually able to do a fast lap. After that though, Q2 and Q3 were a lot stronger for them and they ended up being the only two drivers in Q3 with qualifying times in the 1.29s

11:34

Other than that though, Alonso managed to get in between the Ferraris and the Mercedes which I’m sure was a really welcome sight to him and the Aston Martin garage. But what was slightly gutting was the fact that not a single one of the rookies managed to make it out of Q1. And don’t get me wrong, it’s not exactly surprising. F1 quali is different from the lower formulas and FE quali and they are still getting used to the cars at this point but it definitely would have been great to see at least one of them manage to get into Q2. Logan Sargeant was on the cusp of that to be fair to him. He set the exact same time as Lando in Q1 but since Lando set the time first, Logan was eliminated.

12:24

And that about sums up the main points of quali. Merecedes seem on the back foot a little bit and the midfield, it's being the midfield. We've got a bit of mixed up grid there. We've got cars managing to get through that I didn't think would and it's been pretty exciting there. But now let's move on to the main event. The race.

12:44

We didn’t even need to wait for lights out to get some news. The FIA documents started to get released about any changes that were made during Parc Ferme and to the panic of the Tifosi and Charles fans everywhere, those documents said that Ferrari had replaced both the energy store and the control electronics for the race. Now as far as I know, the energy store was a precautionary measure for Ferrari. With the control electronics, I’m not so sure but it was probably the same reason. I feel like if there was a bigger issue I would have heard about it. I would have seen something but as far as I know, I think it was just precautionary as well.

13:29

But this wasn’t the end of the world, right? Because Charles hasn’t gone over the allowance, so it means that he wasn’t getting a penalty and he would still be starting from third on the grid. Great, right? Wonderful. No. The concern for me came in when I found out that you're only allowed two energy stores and two control electronics replacements throughout the entire season. So, within the very first race of a 23-race season, Charles had already gone through half of his allowance for those two components…and I don’t know what to say about that guys. If it's precautionary, I’m hoping that they can just go into a pool and be reused again if they’re fine but if they can’t do that or they’re not allowed then the likelihood is, we’re going to be seeing this man ending up with some penalties for those parts. So, I can’t lie, that wasn’t the best start to the race day for me.

14:36

But you know what, Bahrain started off pretty tame for me at lights out. After winter break, months of these guys not racing, I thought that it might be a little messy coming off the line and getting to the first corner but surprisingly, everyone was pretty well-behaved. There was a little bit of contact with Lance and Alonso during the first lap but it was nothing major. For a minute Crofty and Martin were concerned that Fernando might have had a puncture but he was all good. So yeah, way more well-behaved than I had been expecting. Especially watching the feeder series. i thought that there might be a little more drama. But thankfully, everyone was really safe coming into that first corner.

15:24

In general though guys, I have to be honest, the Bahrain Grand Prix did not excite me. For the first race of the season, the first race of the year… it just gave me nothing. Okay maybe nothing is a little harsh, but it wasn’t the most exciting race that I’ve seen.

15:41

The first part of the race felt so slow. We had all of the drivers, bar Kevin, on soft tyres but the track at Bahrain is so abrasive and can wreck your tyres so quickly, that a lot of the drivers seemed to be focusing on tyre management more than overtaking and attacking. They just wanted to make sure that they could make it to the pit window for the soft tyres with no major problems so I don’t know whether that’s why some of them were a little more reserved with their lap times and overtaking. But it was a pretty slow start.

16:20

I thought the racing would get a little better when everyone swapped onto the hards but they’re a little more durable. But once again, a lot of tyre management. A lot of the drivers just wanted to keep the right lap times and make sure that they didn’t have to pit too early or just make it to the end of the race.

16:40

We did have some great battles though but most of them came from Fernando, or at least the most that Sky me showed came from him. And considering that tyre degradation didn’t seem to be an issue for Aston during testing and that they had the pace to catch up to the drivers in front of them, I wasn't surprised at all by this.

17:04

I knew that the Aston was going to be fast this weekend and I had a feeling that they were going to end up in front of the Mercedes. But what I hadn’t expected was for Fernando to be able to get past the Ferrari of Carlos Sainz, I didn’t think they would have the pace for that, honestly. And I know some people did think that would be the case. But I was definitely in the camp of in front of Mercedes but still behind Ferrari.

17:30

But I mean, when Fernando was closing up to Carlos towards the end of the race and Carlos’ race engineer got on the radio to tell him to defend. Fernando's behind you. Keep your position, you've got this. Carlos had said that it was basically gonna be a toss up either him losing this place to Fernando and keeping his tyres in a good enough window that he wouldn't have to put or him trying to defend and then not being able to make it to the end of the race on his set of tyres.

17:58

I think he made the right decision there, Fernando would have just kept going for that overtake if he didn’t get him on the first try and it was going to wear out Carlos’ tyres even more and potentially lost him more places rather than just the one. So, like I mentioned last episode when I spoke about preseason testing, that Ferrari tyre wear is going to be causing some problems for the team during races and I hope it's something that they can figure out pretty soon.

18:28

Fernando had an electric race though. And he just gave me battles that I wanted to see on track. Racing gets boring when it’s so processional, you want to see drivers attacking and defending and seeing Fernando on the attack with George, Lewis and Carlos, Lance Stroll right at the start when they bumped into each other. That's what can make racing so exciting. These were hard-fought battles and they weren’t places that Fernando could just get on first try for most of them. He was having to fight and we were seeing the defence, seeing the drivers fight back and those are the parts of the race that I really tuned into and wanted to watch. Everything else, it was just a bit dull.

19:14

I mean the front of the field is pretty boring to watch at time. The gaps between the drivers are so big that you just don't get any interesting action there. We barely actually see them, the cameras don't actually cut to them because there's nothing to really watch. And it’s not just between teams. That's not just me saying, oh between Red Bull and Ferrari there's a big gap, it’s between teammates.

19:42

Max flew off of the line and didn’t really need to look over his shoulder after that and Checo just wasn’t able to keep up with that pace that Max was setting. It was the same story when we look at both of the Ferrari’s. Charles was running ahead before his DNF, which I will get into, and Carlos didn’t seem to be anywhere near him.

20:05

The midfield battle though, guys, I love the fact that the cars are generally a fair bit closer to each other but I want to see that across the entire field. Not just at the midfield. And there’s just no competition at the front and it’s so processional. Except for that first lap where we might get one or two overtakes coming off the line, there's nothing there after that.

20:31

I want more interesting action up there. There has to be someone other than Fernando this season, that can pull forward and get closer to some of the other cars because this is exactly what happened last season and it got boring at the front very quickly because we didn't get to see any of the action at the front. When Charles had slowly faded away from that championship battle and the Ferrari wasn't able to keep up with Max, we stopped seeing anything at the front because there was no longer a battle to look at. And it's like I said especially between teammates I wanna see battles. The fact that the gaps are so big between them… I mean if Red Bull are going to have another runaway year can we at least have Checo a little closer to the fight with Max instead of being ten seconds off? Give us something a little more interesting at the front so that the camera can actually pan there and we see something going on.

21:26

I really hope that this is just the case for Bahrain and that we might see everyone a little closer in the top 6 as the season continues but I just have this gut feeling that that isn't going to happen.

21:40

Looking elsewhere on the grid, Oscar had an absolute stinker on his F1 debut. 15 laps into the Grand Prix and he had to retire from the race. That’s just absolutely gutting, let’s be honest. They brought him into the pits after he was having some problems, swapped over his steering wheel and it just wasn’t fixing anything for him. I think Zak Brown had mentioned that it might be an electronics issue but no one really wants to look back at their F1 debut and say yeah, I raced 15 laps and that was it. It’s just gutting for him, especially since he hasn’t been racing in 16 months I think? That’s a long time to wait to get back into a race car competitively and to only then run 15 laps…

22:37

McLaren overall just had a bit of a bad day, let’s be honest. Lando ended up finishing in 17th. He pitted over 5 times which is just insane but they needed to keep topping up the car with some air, so there was definitely an issue that he was carrying there but nothing terminal so that he couldn’t continue racing but he did keep needing to make those pitstops. I mean, I feel like the probably left him out there to just try and get some more data on the car but wow… this was just a nightmare start to the season for McLaren. they walked away from Bahrain with absolutely no points and one retired car. I don't think that's the way they wanted their season to start. It definitely wasn't but to be that far away from the points as well. I don't know what McLaren are going to do to try and claw their way back up but it is not looking good for them right now.

23:37

Oscar wasn’t the only driver to retire from the race. We also had Charles and Esteban not seeing the checkered flag.

23:45

Charles looked like he was running a pretty smooth race to be honest with you. Wasn’t matching the Red Bull's pace but he was sitting pretty happy in P3 with no problems. And then I see the camera swap back to his car which we haven’t seen in a while, some sounds that weren’t the best, and then him slowly trundling to pull onto the side before Sky played a very dejected Charles radio.

24:19

My heart sank guys. I hadn’t heard any radios beforehand where he was complaining that something didn’t feel quite right with the car. Like I mentioned before, they had replaced parts of the PU as a precautionary measure so like an absolute fool, I didn’t expect there to be a problem. It sounds like there’s an issue with the engine. Surprise surprise. There had been so much talk about Ferrari sorting out the reliability of their engine over winter break and then we get to the first race and it just gives up. The worst part was just how done Charles sounded. Not even angry, just like he had almost expected this to be the case. I am gonna hope so badly that this is a one-off issue and we won’t have this continuing throughout the season but Charles has said that he didn’t even get any warnings about the engine wanting to fail. Nothing on his dashboard, I don’t think he had felt anything strange and it just gave up. So, we’ll have to see how that goes but considering these are new engines. We're one race in. I don't think they're using the same engines from testing right now. This doesn’t bode well for the Prancing Horse.

25:39

And then we had Esteban. Poor Esteban Ocon, who ended up being given a total of 15 seconds in penalties before retiring from the race. It just wasn’t his day, let’s be honest. He was starting in 8th place which was a pretty strong start but the problems started with him being out of position on the starting grid. So, the FIA gave him a 5-second time penalty. So, he served it when he went into the pits to get his front wing changed. And then he was under investigation for not serving the time penalty correctly. Basically, when you’re given a time penalty, it’s either added at the end of the race if you haven’t done a pit stop or you serve it at a pit stop. But if you are going to serve it at a pit stop then no one can work on your car, no tyre changes, no fans for the brakes. No one is allowed to touch your car in any way shape or form.

26:42

But by the looks of it, an Alpine mechanic touched Esteban's car just a little too early and it meant that the FIA gave him a 10-second time penalty. So, he went into to serve that. nd when he went into the pitlane to serve that, they had found that he was speeding down the pitlane and gave him another 5-second time penalty. After getting that final penalty, the team did decide to retire the car. Now, from what I’ve seen I don’t think there was anything wrong with the car but I don’t know if they just decided not to run the engine the full race distance when they knew that they weren’t going to get into the points and Pierre was still racing so they were getting data from him. But honestly, this was just such an unlucky day for Esteban and I’m sure he’s gonna wanna forget about this race pretty quickly. I know I would.

27:37

He wasn’t the only one getting penalties though. On his first rave back after a little while away, Nico Hulkenberg seemed to forget about track limits. To be fair, the rule has changed since he’s been off of the grid and the FIA had done a blanket rule to say that on any track, if all four wheels are over the white line then it’s a track limit violation. But he had gone over it three times and been given a warning, the fourth time he had been given a five-second time penalty and just for good measure then he went over it a fifth and the stewards gave him another 10-second time penalty. To be fair to him, I’m saying that he forgot about track limits but it could have been that the Haas was just not an easy car to handle that day. It's something I'm going to look into because we didn't really see much of them on screen. So it might not be him and it could just be the handling of the Haas. But that was not going to be the comeback he had hoped for since he finished in 15th.

28:40

Mercedes had a bit of stinker of a day as well. Wasn't great for them. Toto Wolff is definitely not impressed with the car right now. Like Lewis said, they went from being the third fastest team to the fourth since Aston Martin has pushed their way right up there. So, there is a lot of work to be done there for them. Fifth and seventh are not bad places for Mercedes but they really wanted to take a step forward this season and it just hasn't happened yet.

29:08

For driver of the day, you guys voted for Fernando Alonso and I completely understand why. He had a pretty epic race, did some great overtakes and brought a trophy back to the Aston garage. Just a phenomenal race for both him and the team. But my driver of the day is going to the other Aston Martin driver and that’s Lance Stroll. Look, I don’t think he should really have been driving that weekend. But for a guy that had two broken wrists and a broken toe to come out in 8th, it was extremely impressive and he managed to split the Mercedes cars at the end. George was not able to get past him. So, that’s why Lance Stroll is my driver of the day.

29:55

I also have a nifty little spreadsheet that calculates my own driver power rankings. Now I’m not saying that this is perfect and I’ll probably tweak it as time goes on but it’s just a way from me to sort of rank the drivers purely based on stats and none of my bias about drivers that I like and I'm not the biggest fan of. So it makes it a little easier. Basically, it takes into account the places they’ve gained or lost in the race, their quali, sprint and race classification. A sprint where it's applicable. And then the points share between them and their teammatem as well as where the team in in the constructors. So, the higher the team are the more they're penalised in the power ranking.

30:37

So, I’m not going to give you the full list of 20, I might post that over on my tiktok and insta. So, head over to @stewards_office if you wanna look at that But the top three from the GP are Carlos, Alex and Valterri. And at the bottom, we have Oscar, Estban and Charles. So, the three who DNF'd

31:01

I can’t lie I’m a huge data nerd and I love doing things like this, so I am going to be keeping a track and then tallying the scores and the end of the season to see who comes out on top and I will update you guys after everywhere on who the top three are, who the bottom three are. And overall, over the course of the season where people are starting to fall.

31:23

And everything I thought about the Bahrain Grand Prix. Not the most exciting start to the season, I can’t lie. But I am hopeful that we’ll see the field close up a bit more throughout the season. I really hope they do guys, because I need a little more excitement on a race weekend. Let's see how it goes though. We've got a week now before we head out to Saudi Arabia. And I guess we'll also see whether some cars are more track specific and whether some cars are better all-rounders. So, not too long to wait but let's wait and see what happens there.

32:03

Thank you guys and diolch yn fawr for listening. Make sure you follow this podcast because next week I’m going to be talking about one of the biggest scandals in motorsport history, I’ll see you guys the next time you're summoned to the steward's office