Day-1 in Bahrain

First day in Bahrain is in the books, as they are going for time I’m guessing everyone is running with low fuel and the car is set up accordingly. A quick look down the times from the two Friday sessions show a few things:

• Michael is not in the groove, a little rusty or underestimated the level of competition as he was beat by Nico Rosberg in both sessions by close to half a second.
• The top four cars in the second session were all powered by Mercedes and were almost 0.4 faster then the best of the rest.
• Did not catch anything obvious, but Ferrari did not improve as much as the other top teams in the second session. Working on race setup perhaps?
• There is nothing between Hamilton and Button in qualifying trim with less than 0.2 separating them in either session.
• Nico Hulkenberg could be the one of the next pretenders to the title, fast and the consistent improvement he shoed in the preseason seems to have carried on through to today. He comes rather hyped and delivered two performances that beat his teammate Barachello by about a second each time.
• The Lotus’s are about 5 seconds off the pace, the two Virgin cars a further two seconds back and the Hispanias somewhere far off in the distance in what is really first shakedown run.
• Vettel looked good and Weber had some issues in the second session, but was comprehensively beaten in the earlier run.
• Sauber found a lot of speed between the first and second session.

Top teams look like the predicable group, Mercedes, McLaren Red Bull and Ferrari with Sauber and Williams close behind.

Last word goes to Michael – “It’s not a problem. It’s just that for one lap I saw that Nico was four-tenths up and that is a bit too much for my standards. I’ve got to raise my game a bit and I’m sure I’m able to.”