It was a crushing performance, although Red Bull’s chief technical officer Adrian Newey offered a note of caution.
“This car is clearly a close evolution of last year’s,” he told the F1 Nation podcast. “We had a good, detailed look, tried to be critical of its weaknesses, tried to improve on those in lots of small ways.
“And on a sample of one that seems to have worked reasonably well, because it is a sample of one, this circuit has some peculiarities to it.
“So we need to be careful to keep our feet in the ground and keep pushing. But a relief I must admit to get the first one under the belt.”
Newey has been around the block a few times, and he’s right to be cautious. Yes, it was a dominant victory, but as he noted Bahrain is an atypical venue, featuring the oldest track surface on the calendar. Red Bull certainly got everything right – after some reliability and set-up wobbles on Friday – but there are 22 venues to come.
This season will be a development race as teams juggle scarce resources, meaning within the limits of the cost cap and the wind tunnel and CFD allowances that stem from their positions in the aero testing restriction league table, as effectively as they can.
There is still plenty of scope for the pecking order to change, and the big hope for rivals is that RBR’s position at the bottom of the ATR table, with a further 10% penalty on top of that after last year’s cost cap controversy, will rein it in.
There’s another factor which doesn’t relate to hard numbers provided by the regulations and which is much harder for us to quantify – how much scope for development is available within the individual aero concepts chosen by each team as they search week-in, week-out for marginal gains in downforce and efficiency. And that could prove to be the key.
Aston Martin
Fernando Alonso and Aston Martin followed up on the promise of Bahrain testing and free practice as the Spaniard charged to third place. Had he not made a bad start – and been nudged on the first lap by his own team mate – Alonso would have been much further up the road.
He wouldn’t have challenged the Red Bulls, but he probably would have taken the fight to Leclerc had the Ferrari stayed healthy. Crucially despite Alonso’s aggressive approach, the AMR23 was not afflicted by the high levels of tyre deg that hampered Ferrari and Mercedes.
Aston’s leap has come from sheer hard work in the tunnel, helmed by key new recruits Dan Fallows and Eric Blandin, and there’s surely more to come.