What Hadjar’s long runs reveal compared to Verstappen’s benchmark

In the morning, McLaren and Ferrari were the top teams out on track. With Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris, both teams were able to rack up a lot of mileage. Long runs were important for McLaren in the morning. The newly crowned world champion did his runs on the hard and medium compounds. Leclerc followed with two short runs on the soft tire.

Judging by Ferrari’s run plan, they were likely focused mainly on qualifying runs in the morning. Leclerc only ran on the soft tire and quickly topped the timesheets as he set a time that he never relinquished. Norris came close but was focused on a different program and, unlike Wednesday, did not finish with the fastest time.

When analyzing lap times and long runs during winter testing, as usual we must keep in mind that we don’t know what engine modes and fuel loads the teams were running. Even so, the consistency of the runs is a good indication of whether things are running smoothly or not.

After completing an installation lap before lunch, Red Bull was finally able to continue with the program in the afternoon. Following Wednesday, Verstappen was the benchmark, as he had put in very consistent and fast long runs on all compounds. You can find the long runs from day 1 here.

Hadjar was certainly busy in the afternoon session. The French-Algerian driver did a short long run on the soft tire, two longer ones on the mediums (in the table LR1 and LR2), and a longer one on the hard tire. In the table below, we’ve placed his times alongside Verstappen’s long runs on the three different compounds. Verstappen’s runs were also from the afternoon session to keep conditions as similar as possible for the analysis.

As mentioned before, it is not known whether Red Bull created two different run plans for its drivers. It could be that Hadjar was running with more fuel on Thursday afternoon or using a different engine mode to build confidence first, and that on Friday the throttle would be opened up further.

What stands out regardless is that Hadjar is about two seconds off Verstappen on the medium tires, one second on the hard compound, and nearly 2.5 seconds on the softs.

In the afternoon, live timing was interrupted once, but the long runs of George Russell, Leclerc, and Norris could still be analyzed. In the afternoon, Russell completed a substantial long run on the 'anonymous' colorless Pirelli tire and then did another stint on the soft tire. Leclerc mainly ran on softs, but his stint was interrupted by traffic.

Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff feared on Wednesday that they were a second behind Verstappen and Red Bull, which again appears to be the case when comparing Verstappen’s long runs on Wednesday (in table 1) with Russell’s run in the table above. Norris is the fastest driver on the soft tire, although he is slower than Russell on the harder compounds.

Leclerc’s long run on the hard tire, which he completed at the end of the afternoon session, is about four tenths faster than Verstappen’s from Wednesday afternoon. On day 1, Verstappen averaged 1:37.876 on the hard tire; Leclerc is at 1:37.423.