How the final morning of F1 2025 pre-season testing played out

Charles Leclerc's Ferrari was fastest on the final morning of Formula 1 2025 pre-season testing in Bahrain, edging out Mercedes rookie Kimi Antonelli by less than a tenth of a second.

Much like during Thursday afternoon's race simulations, there was very little to separate Ferrari and Mercedes - with Antonelli just 0.077s slower on the same C3 Pirelli tyre compound.

At one stage Antonelli had the fastest individual time for each of the three sectors of the Sakhir circuit, but perhaps typically for a rookie he failed to put them all together. Had he done so, he'd have been four tenths clear on a 1m30.410s ideal lap.

There was a suggestion Leclerc also benefitted from setting his best time much earlier in the session, when the wind was less severe.

Lando Norris put pre-season favourite McLaren third fastest, only 0.132s off the pace despite using the harder C2 tyre.

Norris has suggested that, despite its prodigious long-run pace so far, McLaren is battling an oversteer limitation on the new MCL39 and he survived two big oversteer moments at the Turn 4 right-hander during this session.

But those incidents could just as well have been wind related, or to do with the fact track temperature has climbed towards 33°C after sitting in the late-teens on Thursday.

Even so, in the longer runs Norris's McLaren looked to be running again at a pace comfortably quicker than the Ferrari or Mercedes, suggesting regardless of any inherent performance advantage the F1 paddock feels the new McLaren might have, it could be running lighter and/or using a more powerful engine mode than the other top cars at this stage of testing.

Norris went quickest in the first sector in the final hour, but had two more big oversteer moments through the final two corners that wrecked his lap.

Max Verstappen is back in Red Bull's new RB21 for the final day of testing and he finished the morning fourth, almost four tenths off the pace.

Red Bull appears to be running a back-to-back comparison of different nose designs, as Mercedes did on day one, and now has a version available with a slot gap immediately below the nose tip.

We're yet to see Red Bull do a comparative race run at a comparable time to McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes, and that was never likely to happen during a daytime session on a track where F1 now usually races under floodlights. Hopefully it will this afternoon.

Jack Doohan was fifth fastest for Alpine, two tenths clear of Alex Albon's Williams, in what the F1 paddock seems to feel is the emerging battle to be best of the rest behind the 'big four' teams, as Aston Martin, Racing Bulls, Sauber and Haas continue to look unremarkable for different reasons.

Rookie Isack Hadjar was seventh fastest for Racing Bulls, three tenths down on the Williams and three tenths up on the Aston Martin - this morning driven by Fernando Alonso in place of Lance Stroll, who will return to driving this afternoon after feeling too unwell to drive this morning.

The Sauber of Gabriel Bortoleto and Haas of Ollie Bearman rounded out the morning classification. The Sauber managed only 30 laps after spending a long time in the garage with a floor problem.

Bearman's best lap of 1m32.361s was Haas's fastest of the test so far, 1.5s off Leclerc's pace, but it seems Haas is still yet to drop the fuel out of that car and give any indication of what it can really do.

Haas's biggest drama of the morning was the engine cover breaking loose while Bearman was out on track.

The almost iron-clad reliability of the cars meant there were hardly any delays to the morning's running.

There was a brief yellow flag to retrieve a chair that blew onto the track and then a short red flag period during the final hour when a panel of glass on the start gantry fell onto the track and shattered on the pit straight.

Friday morning times

1 Leclerc (Ferrari) 1m30.811s
2 Antonelli (Mercedes) +0.077s
3 Norris (McLaren) +0.132s
4 Verstappen (Red Bull) +0.398s
5 Doohan (Alpine) +0.428s
6 Albon (Williams) +0.633s
7 Hadjar (Racing Bulls) +0.950s
8 Alonso (Aston Martin) +1.273s
9 Bortoleto (Sauber) +1.336s
10 Bearman (Haas) +1.550s