Max Verstappen & Charles Leclerc Dominate FP3 as Mercedes F1 Show Signs of Revival

Max Verstappen continued to embrace his dominance over the rest of the pack as he clinched P1 over the final F1 practice session in Bahrain.

How the F1 session unfolded

The back-markers of 2021, Haas and Alfa Romeo, were the first set of teams to unleash their cars onto the track. Seconds later, both Lewis Hamilton and George Russell, too, hit the track, which hardly came as a surprise considering their bitter-sweet runs in FP1 and FP2.

And quite contrastingly, Red Bull had their garage closed with the engineers busy working on both the RB18. Two minutes into the session, Bottas set the fastest lap time of 1:38:840 on hard, merely pipping his rookie teammate, Zhou. Haas, on the other hand, toured the circuit twice before heading back into the pits.

10 minutes into the session, Norris and Hulkenberg finally exited the pit lane onto the rather empty track. The McLaren driver topped the timesheet with a 1:36:317 but was soon superseded by Hamilton’s 1:34:256 on soft tires. Russell ended up just over 0.3s slower than his teammate.

However, then arrived the high-flying Ferrari pair, Sainz and Leclerc. The latter defeated Hamilton’s lap time by almost 0.5s, taking control of the lead. With the session reaching the half-hour mark, the defending champion marked his arrival with a blistering lap time of 1:33:035.

Charles Leclerc escapes a scary moment as AlphaTauri endure trouble

With 25 minutes left on the clock, Leclerc was going after Verstappen’s fastest lap time but was barely fast enough heading into the second sector. Then arrived a scary moment for the Monegasque as his Ferrari suffered a dramatic spin around turn 11.

Lucky for Leclerc, there was a gravel trap placed around the run-off area which helped in slowing down the out-of-control F1-75. The tires though? Absolutely wrecked. Soon after, Tsunoda, who was then exiting his garage, faced an awful lot of trouble with his AlphaTauri.

The Japanese struggled with a dead steering wheel, along with an odd smell of oil coming from under the car.

Mercedes F1 show signs of revival

Porpoising finally seemed to have let off for Mercedes as Hamilton pulled off an amazing flying lap. The Briton did fail to defeat Verstappen’s lap time but managed to get his W13 within 0.1s of the Dutchman. Of course, this is good news for the entire Brackley outfit, considering how their cars had been performing since Barcelona testing in February.

Like a cherry on the cake, Russell secured the fastest lap time with a 1:32:935.

With just over 10 minutes to go, Leclerc and Verstappen chased after the fastest lap again, only for the latter to come out ahead; Verstappen re-claimed the lead as Leclerc ended up 0.1s behind the Red Bull driver. In the end, it was Verstappen and Leclerc at the top, followed by Perez, Russell, Sainz, Hamilton, Magnussen, Bottas, Zhou, and Stroll completing the top 10.

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