Bahrain GP FP2 Report: Max Verstappen Charges to the Top While Ferrari F1 Maintain Dominance

The FP2 session at the Sakhir International Circuit for the Bahrain Grand Prix started under the lights. The session is extremely important, as it will be the first indication of the performance runs for the teams. Conditions for the session match the conditions that the F1 cars and drivers will experience in the qualifying tomorrow.

The Ferrari pair of Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz exchanged the top honors in the first running of the sessions. Both of them were over a second ahead of Mercedes driver George Russell on the medium tires. Surprisingly, Kevin Magnussen was also ahead of the young British driver.

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World champion Max Verstappen too was half a second down on Leclerc’s time of 1:33:121 on his first run on the medium tires. But everyone was waiting for soft tires and performance runs. On the Medium tires, Hamilton was over a second behind Charles’ time as well, as he sat in P8 in the early medium runs.

F1 world champion Max Verstappen finishes P1 in the FP2 ahead of Leclerc

When the drivers went on the soft tires, Ferrari and Leclerc really showed their strength and went six-tenths faster than Alonso on the same tires. The Monegasque driver set the timings ablaze as he went more than half a second faster than everyone in the middle sector.

But it was the defending champion, Verstappen, who was the only driver to challenge the Ferrari driver as he went P1 by less than a tenth of a second.

In the soft tires runnings, Mercedes were still behind their rivals by a margin of half a second. Surprisingly, Russell was the lead Mercedes driver ahead of his 7-time world champion teammate by more than seven-tenths in the final runs of the session.

When it came to race performances, both Ferrari and Red Bull were again the class of the field. Interestingly, it was the Haas F1 team that surprised everyone with their consistent race pace.

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Fernando Alonso once again impressed everyone with his pace in the Free Practice 2. He finished the session in P5 just under a second behind the Red Bull of Verstappen.

Daniel Ricciardo sat out most of the session because of the water leak in his car. He finished the session in P18 with teammate Lando Norris finishing in P11.