Thursday's Best Ferrari Man: 'Valuable data collected'

Of course it was 'only' the first day of testing. Of course a long season awaits. But anyone who only looked at the results of the sessions would think that little has changed in Bahrain for now: Red Bull was faster than Ferrari.

Needless to say, not too many conclusions should be drawn. The outside world has no idea how much fuel on board the Red Bull and Ferrari were driving with. Moreover, tyre choice and temperature in Bahrain were an important factor in the times. Still, there was a gap of four tenths with Max Verstappen in his Red Bull.

Making good progress

Carlos Sainz was the fastest Ferrari man, although it made little difference to teammate Charles Leclerc. The Spaniard said in a press release: "Overall a positive first day. Reliability was good and we could run smoothly, covering the whole run plan and gathering valuable data, which is encouraging. We progressed well with the setup during the day and we also managed to get good reads on the tyres we tested in Abu Dhabi so, overall good progress made so far and I’m looking forward to continuing tomorrow."

Teammate Leclerc told: "We have a busy first day of testing behind us. We completed 64 laps on my side, testing a bit of everything. Our focus was on set-up work, combined with some tyre and aero testing, as well as runs with different fuel levels. We’re going to analyse our data now and I look forward to another session tomorrow.