Why Perez was the sensation of Bahrain Friday

Amid the first Bahrain Grand Prix practice day, a couple of stories may be taking form which turn out to extend beyond just this race weekend.

The outspoken reaction of Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel to the prototype 2021 tyres is dealt with elsewhere on the site. The other future-deciding story might be around Red Bull’s 2021 driver line-up.

Alex Albon suffered a heavy crash just as he could least afford it – before he was able to complete a long run, and on a day when the form of Sergio Perez in the Racing Point suggests another sensational result in the Racing Point may be on the cards.

Bahrain in late November is unfamiliar to Formula 1, but the outcome of Friday running here wasn’t.

Regardless of the fact that we’re back to the ‘old normal’ of trying to keep the tyres from getting too hot (rather than the ‘new normal’ of Istanbul, Portimao and Nurburgring where the trick was to get the tyres up to temperature), the competitive order looked quite familiar.

In between extensive testing of the prototype 2021 Pirelli tyres, the Albon crash that cut out 20 minutes of the second session, plus a brief canine-triggered delay, the teams’ Bahrain data banks weren’t as full as they’d like.

But that data made one thing quite clear: the circuit is taking a lot from the rear tyres. That’s not a new phenomenon around Sakhir, with its multiple acceleration zones, but it looks likely to make the race one of those very rare things: a default two-stop race.

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The desert is a much cooler place than when we normally come here in late March. A track temperature of 25-26 deg C probably didn’t help with putting the tyres in the right window. But as a generalisation there was little apparent difference in one-lap pace between the C4 soft and C3 medium.

Although Hamilton used a set of softs to set head FP2, this was barely a tenth faster than he’d managed in FP1 on the mediums. Max Verstappen’s second-fastest FP2 time was on the mediums and shaded the soft-shod lap of Valtteri Bottas by a few hundredths.

The small apparent difference in lap time between the two tyre types has some interesting implications for qualifying. The rear-lefts of both types degrade very quickly, but it’s extreme with the softs. They were lasting little more than four laps before lap times fell off a cliff.

The medium looked OK for around 12-13 laps – with Perez’s Racing Point proving as much quite conclusively. In fact Perez was still setting respectable times as the session came to a close.

Logically therefore you don’t want to be starting the race on the softs if you can avoid it. Given that there’s little, if any, one-lap penalty for using mediums, we might expect that it will not just be Mercedes and Verstappen going for them in Q2. We might just see everyone on them.

With some adjustments made for estimated fuel loads, the FP2 ‘long’ runs look as shown in the table below:

We see Verstappen turning around the Mercedes single-lap advantage – and the Red Bull is about the only car to get a reasonable length run from the softs – but we’ve seen this often before. A few overnight set-up changes later and the Mercedes single lap pace invariably translates on race day.

But it’s promising, nonetheless. The Red Bull, with the raft of changes made at Istanbul, is getting quicker and the Mercedes development has been switched off.

The Red Bull remains a tricky car to drive and it’s unusual here in giving its front tyres a hard time – but that may actually be a blessing on Sunday. Obviously Albon demonstrated the car’s trickiness in most dramatic fashion, but Verstappen too suffered a spin in the morning and had several moments.

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Perhaps the most impressive long run was that of Perez. Fifteen laps on the mediums was more than twice as long as Verstappen or Hamilton’s runs, and yet he was within 0.4s of them. Lance Stroll’s run was almost as impressive.

Although Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari pace average was only slightly slower, it was achieved over just six laps and the tyres were already being reported as ‘dead’ by Leclerc. Similarly, Carlos Sainz Jr’s average looks OK, and the McLaren looked to be treating its tyres better than the Ferrari, but the downward slope of his lap times was sharper than those of either Racing Points.

On Friday form, the pink cars are heavy favourites for the ‘Class B’ win. A dark horse looks to be Esteban Ocon’s Renault on the mediums.

Practice 2 Results