The Ferrari driver later blamed his team’s strategy for being unable to secure pole, stating that burning an extra set of soft tyres in Q1 meant that he did his first Q3 lap on scrubbed tyres and lost the rhythm that comes with doing your crucial laps on tyres on a similar state of wear. In the end He was 0.228sec behind Verstappen – who improved on his final run.
There was also encouragement for Mercedes, with George Russell within a tenth of Leclerc. That is certainly a huge improvement on their opening qualifying sessions of 2022 and 2023 when they were 0.68 and 0.63 seconds off the pole lap respectively. Hamilton, who finished final practice fastest, qualified down in ninth, albeit only a couple of tenths adrift of his team-mate. After the session he said he hoped that his set-up change for qualifying gives him more race pace today.
Of course, there is every chance that Verstappen takes the lead at the first corner and does not even need to look in his mirrors, as was the case for most of last year. But there is reason for optimism too. Last year 1.1sec separated the top eight in qualifying and this year that was halved.
Red Bull’s biggest advantage was always in race trim so today will be a good test (as untypical a circuit as Bahrain is) for how competitive a season we might see. The race gets under way at 3pm GMT and we will be here for all of the build-up, live updates and reaction from it.