Perez set the fastest time on Pirelli's C4 compound tyres, as Red Bull appeared to shift its focus to performance ahead of next week's race.
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Sergio Perez set the pace on the final morning of this week’s preseason test in Bahrain, going 0.4s faster than any other driver so far, thanks to an updated version of the Red Bull RB18. On the final day of testing, the Red Bull received reprofiled sidepods with tighter packaging around the car’s internals and a revised opening to the car’s floor. Perez set the fastest time on Pirelli’s C4 compound tyres, as Red Bull appeared to shift its focus to performance ahead of next week’s race.
Perez set his time on a single flying lap before returning to the pits, cycling through Pirelli’s various compounds on qualifying-style laps, including the softest C5 tyre, which was the fastest Pirelli tyre over one lap.
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His time was 0.854s faster than Alfa Romeo rookie driver Guanyu Zhou, who also set his best time on the C4 compound in a single lap. The next fastest driver, Pierre Gasly, was 0.9 seconds behind him, but the AlphaTauri driver and the other seven on the track appeared to be concentrating on longer runs rather than qualifying-style laps.
On Friday morning, Gasly was one of the drivers who tried a race simulation and found himself sharing the track with Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes, which was also doing a race simulation. A race simulation is exactly what it sounds like: teams fill the car to the brim with fuel and attempt to complete a race distance to see how the car reacts as the fuel runs out.
At one point, Hamilton and Gasly went wheel to wheel, trading positions on the track from one lap to the next. When they met on the track, Hamilton was slightly further into his race simulation, implying that he would have had the advantage of being on a lower fuel load. Even so, it’s difficult to draw any conclusions from the fight other than the fact that the new cars appear to be able to follow each other through Bahrain’s high-speed corners and overtake in the low-speed sections.
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McLaren needed to make up time on Saturday morning after spending two days in Bahrain dealing with brake cooling issues. The team brought some upgrades to the track to help manage the problem, but admits it won’t have a final fix until the opening race next weekend. Lando Norris stood in for teammate Daniel Ricciardo, who tested positive for Covid-19 earlier this week, and completed 39 laps in total after two complete test days in the mid 50s. Ricciardo is currently quarantined at his hotel in Bahrain, but he should be cleared to compete in the first race next weekend.
