Red Bull’s Bahrain F1 laptimes ‘competitive without trying’

Red Bull was “reasonably competitive without even trying” on the penultimate day of Formula 1’s 2022 pre-season testing, according to its head of race engineering Guillaume Rocquelin.

The team has gone through the pre-season so far with little of what could be reasonably termed as ‘performance running’ – but did send out its reigning champion Max Verstappen on a couple of runs on the red-walled C4 tyre towards the end of Friday’s action, with Verstappen clearly let loose and pushing for a laptime.

And though Verstappen ended up nearly five tenths adrift of main pacesetter Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz – and nearly eight tenths adrift of Kevin Magnussen, who used Haas’s allowed extra hour of running to set the day’s best time – Rocquelin made it clear this was of no concern.

“It was more of a stop-start day today, mostly by design,” he summed up, with Verstappen logging 86 laps and spending a big chunk of time after the mid-day break in particular in the garage.

“We had a good continuous run yesterday, so today was more about exploring and testing different things. We spent more time in the garage making changes to the car and also taking more risks.

“We learned a lot and gathered a lot of information today. I’m quite happy with what we found out, we are progressing in different directions and it’s all very positive.

“We were reasonably competitive at the end without even trying.”

Verstappen added: “So far the car is pretty good but there are always areas to work on”.

While Mercedes – through both George Russell and Lewis Hamilton – has projected something of a concerned tone, Red Bull’s rhetoric is more in line with Ferrari’s declared expectation that 2021’s two leading teams have a lot up their sleeves.

“We need to be careful because, yes, the laptimes are there but we don’t know what Mercedes is doing, we don’t know what Red Bull is doing, we don’t know what whoever is doing in this paddock,” said Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc.

“Mercedes and Red Bull, for sure they have much more to come.

“I wouldn’t get carried away by the laptimes, they don’t mean anything for now.”