Antonelli ends test on a high

Kimi Antonelli finally gets a trouble-free session and responds with the fastest time of the week, as Aston Martin’s struggle continues.

On the face of it, today’s final day of testing was pretty nondescript. With Pirelli holding back the fastest compounds there was no point of ‘glory runs’, while there were only two red flags, neither due to anything serious.

However, though the pecking order remains far from clear – especially if you listen to some of those involved – we did get some of our questions answered, particularly in terms of reliability.

The 17 drivers completed 1,418 laps – the most this week – with Oscar Piastri completing 161 laps in the McLaren, Hamilton 150 laps in the Ferrari, Colapinto 144 in the Alpine, 146 for the Williams pair and 145 for Haas.

When he didn’t emerge until ninety minutes into the afternoon session – teammate George Russell having completed 78 laps this morning – it looked as though the test curse had hit Antonelli once again, however once on track he soon racked up the lap count and having gone quickest set about chipping away and improving.

A number of drivers completed race sims, most notably Hamilton and Piastri, who started theirs around seven laps apart. Both will surely leave here feeling confident, however with Mercedes posting the best two times of the day it will give them food for thought.

At the other end of the timesheets, Cadillac is getting on with the job, likewise Audi, with Hulkenberg looking more comfortable in the car than his young teammate.

Despite – or perhaps in spite of – the claims from Mercedes, its customers and its customer’s drivers that Red Bull is the benchmark, Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar only completed 114 laps between them and both were over 1.5s off the Silver Arrows pace.

As on previous days, there were lock-ups and offs as drivers continue to get used to the new cars, which have been described as constantly driving with Monza levels of downforce.

The two red flags were down to Valtteri Bottas who is thought to have suffered a cooling issue this morning, while Hamilton is understood to have run out of fuel at the very end of the session.

At one point late in the day, Hadjar pulled up at the McLaren pit by mistake and had to be waved through, while at the end of the session as drivers headed to the grid for a practice start, Colapinto almost put his into the barriers as he carried out a burn-out. In his eagerness the Argentine got two wheels on the grass and was lucky to keep it out of the barriers. No doubt Flavio was already in the process of recalling Jack Doohan.

A number of drivers, including Piastri, failed to get away at the practice start, and as Hadjar, Antonelli and Perez battled for the ‘lead’ into Turn 1, Colapinto’s car went into anti-stall and he stopped.

We had hoped to have some idea of a pecking order by now, but while there is a very rough semblance, despite what we are being told there is no clear benchmark.

And while, as Verstappen claims, there might be an element of sandbagging going on, one team clearly does have issues.

Yesterday, Lance Stroll claimed that the Aston Martin is 4s – 4.5s off the pace, and today his best lap was indeed 4.49s off Antonelli best.

In all honesty the car doesn’t look good, that’s when its actually on track.

Some are pointing to Honda, arguing that the Japanese manufacturer is lacking data as it is only supplying one team. Others point to the gearbox.

“It’s one of these issues,” admits Fernando Alonso. “But we mustn’t forget that for the first time in the team’s history, we’re producing the gearbox ourselves. It’s a challenge; we need more information.”

“We are clearly behind,” said Aston Martin ambassador, Pedro de la Rosa. “And when you are losing or you are missing that amount of time, it’s clearly the overall package.

“We cannot say it’s this or the other,” he added. “There’s a lot of areas where we have already identified clearly and we are already working in Silverstone to address them. It won’t be an overnight fix. It’s not a five-minute job.”

It’s somewhat ironic – hopefully not prophetic – that the Silverstone-based outfit recently appointed Jenson Button as a brand ambassador, for this is beginning to have a 2015 feeling about it, when the Briton – and Alonso – were suffering the birth pangs of the McLaren-Honda.

Trouble is, one gets the feeling that yet again Alonso is going to leave/retire just as everything comes good. No doubt Max is watching proceedings with great interest.

At Mercedes, Russell and Antonelli split driving duties, with both focused initially on single lap work before switching their attention to race simulations to end their weeks. The Briton topped the times in the morning session before his teammate surpassed this in the cooler conditions of the afternoon.

After two challenging days to the start the test, with several reliability issues affecting the team’s programme, Friday was more effective with Russell completing 78 laps and Antonelli 64.

“We’ve enjoyed a much more productive day in Bahrain than the previous two have been,” said Russell. “That was important given how much running we had missed on days one and two. We were able to work through some single lap and high fuel running, completing a race distance to end our morning.

“We’ve struggled with reliability this week and our performance hasn’t been where we want it to be. Today, the car felt better balanced than previous days and our pace was reasonable. That said, it is clear that our competitors have looked much stronger than they did in Barcelona and that we have work to do to catch them up. We will put in the hours ahead of next week’s second and final pre-season test to improve and hopefully we can get closer to our rivals ahead of the first race in Melbourne.”

“It’s been a difficult test for us as a team, particularly on my side,” added Antonelli. “We have encountered several reliability issues that meant I only managed just over 30 laps across the first two days. It was therefore a good afternoon today where it was really my first time properly getting to grips with the car here in Bahrain. We were able to complete a good amount of single lap work and then came close to finishing a race simulation.

“Whilst this week has been frustrating, it is much better to have these issues now and be able to work through them, rather than them happening during race weekends. The team is already working through solutions to some of our problems and we can hopefully come back stronger next week. Several of our rivals have looked particularly good and have enjoyed much more trouble-free running here than us. We need to try and extract more from our package and hopefully can begin to make up some of our gap during the second and final pre-season test.”

“We had our strongest day of this first test today,” said Andrew Shovlin, “but still spent far longer in the garage than we would have liked. We have not achieved what we wanted to during this first test and a good amount of work has now shifted into next week’s second and final test. That is frustrating but all part of testing; it’s important to face these challenges head on before the season proper starts.

“Pace wise, we made solid progress today but the W17 has been harder to keep in a happy window here compared to Barcelona. We have a decent baseline to take into next week but it’s clear that some of our competitors, who have had a smoother first test, are in a better position than us and that we have work to do to catch up. Hopefully we can begin to do that during the second test next week.”

Hamilton took to the track shortly after 10, and for all the first part of the day, the car was fitted with C3 compound tyres. The programme centred on a continuation of set-up work and on acquiring data, as had been the case in previous days. Particular attention was paid to comparing different car configurations, as well as assessing tyre behaviour. The Briton did 69 laps, with a variety of run lengths. His best time in the morning was a 1:34.209.

After the lunchbreak, he continued running the C3 tyres, gathering more data and learning more about the car. In the second part of the afternoon, the two other compounds came into play, first the C1 and finally the C2, thus completing a comparison of all three available compounds. In the afternoon, Hamilton did 80 laps, having had another busy and useful day in terms of SF-26 development.

Check out our Friday gallery, here.