Max Verstappen narrowly edged out Fernando Alonso to round out the first day of Formula 1 pre-season testing of 2023 in Bahrain in a familiar position at the top of the timesheets.
The Dutch driver, aiming to make it three world championships on the bounce this year, improved upon his benchmark time from the morning with a 1:32.837 on the C3 compound midway through the afternoon to extend his advantage over the rest.
Alonso came extremely close to toppling the Red Bull in the final hour, however, by setting the fastest final sector to close within 0.029 seconds of Verstappen.
READ MORE: F1 2023 Pre-season testing – Day 1 Results
Charles Leclerc also made an improvement as the day descended into night to end up fourth, fractionally behind Ferrari team-mate Carlos Sainz, while Lando Norris improved McLaren’s outlook on the day by eclipsing Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes to complete the top five.
There was no movement during the opening stages of the second session as many teams handled the transition of splitting the day’s running between its two drivers.
The exception to that came down at Red Bull as Max Verstappen, quickest of all prior to the lunch break, was the fastest out of the blocks at the start of the afternoon.
Within the opening hour every car had ventured out onto the track at some stage, but track conditions were proving increasingly tricky for everybody.
Kevin Magnussen locked up twice early on before Nyck de Vries and Valtteri Bottas also had to make minor corrections through the downhill left-hander of Turn 10.
However, there was more trouble down at Aston Martin. After the Silverstone side’s stoppage in the morning session, which limited it to the least laps of any team, Alonso was out of the car for an entire hour due to a damaged floor, having only completed two exploratory runs.
That minor stoppage failed to throw the two-time champion off track, with Alonso bouncing back to complete 60 laps, including that eye-opening time of 1:32.866 late on.
No team could hold a candle to Red Bull, though, who swiftly became the first team to pass the century mark of laps as Verstappen quietly went through his programme untroubled.
The two-time title winner would eventually end up completing a mammoth 157 laps; the Dutch driver is set to pass the impressive-looking RB19 car over to Sergio Perez tomorrow morning.
It wasn’t quite as seamless down at McLaren, however. Although Piastri was able to log 52 laps in the morning session, its progress in the afternoon with Norris was blighted by an issue that held the Brit in the garage for a considerable length of time.
Eventually, Norris would return to bring the Woking-based outfit’s overall total up to 92 laps and he also promisingly shot up the timing tower to fifth place, 0.6s shy of top spot.
But with McLaren being hampered by limited running last year through a repeated brake issue, more problems will be of concern for the British entity, particularly with only three days to collect mileage before the season opener in a week’s time.
The team’s engine supplier, Mercedes, was quietly buoyed by its opening day of running, with neither driver reporting a reoccurrence of the porpoising problem that stifled the German manufacturer’s progress greatly at the start of last year.
The Silver Arrows, now sporting an all-black livery, accumulated 152 laps in total and already appear in a much stronger position heading into the new season than it did this time 12 months ago.
With the only stoppage of the afternoon coming in the dying embers of the day for another scheduled Virtual Safety Car test, the teams were able to cover plenty of ground and gather crucial early data about its respective packages.
Nine of the 10 entries – except for McLaren, offset by its earlier issues – exceeded the 100-lap count.
As ever when it comes to evaluating testing, the times remain relatively unimportant at this stage of proceedings, particularly when Verstappen’s table-topping effort remained over a second behind the leading time he accrued on the final day of testing last year.
The action will resume at the Bahrain International Circuit across the next two days ahead of the latest F1 campaign beginning at the same venue next weekend.
