It will only be pre-season testing, but 2023 seems to have already found the big favorite in the race for the world title. Max Verstappen, on the strength of the two championships won in the last two seasons, was obviously the observed number one of these three days in Bahrain, which for him already ended tonight given that tomorrow the RB19 will be totally available to Sergio Perez. The Dutchman has not disappointed expectations, showing an impressive speed of adaptation to the new car. Yesterday the idol of the public orange he had signed the best time and completed over 150 laps. This afternoon, after having inherited the car from Sergio Perez, he ‘limited’ himself to the second best performance, letting himself be overtaken by 40 thousandths by Zhou’s Alfa Romeo, which had the advantage of two steps softer tires.
Once again, however, Verstappen was impressed by his pace on long runs. Red Bull’s #1 didn’t let himself be discouraged even by a few small ones technical problem occurred to his car. The only 47 laps completed – only Russell did worse, stopping due to a hydraulic problem at 26 – were due to a oil leak. Yet the Hasselt phenomenon did not appear at all upset in the declarations at the end of the day, revealing great confidence in view of the inaugural GP of the season, which will take place on 5 March. “Today we focused on the small details and took small steps forward – underlined Verstappen – once again, the car responded well to everything we did”.
“We learned a lot in life for next weekend and of course also for future races. I am very satisfied with the test period– added the reigning world champion – because every time I got in the car I felt comfortable and could push straight away. A big credit goes to all the factory employees, who worked all winter and also last year to prepare the car we have now. See her on the track and seeing how it performs is great. We will have to see how fast we are next week, but my sensations are positive.”.
His track engineer, Gianpiero Lambiaseinstead commented on the small hitches that made the team’s afternoon program limp: “We had a small starting problem which, although minor, cost us some track time. That’s why we come to test, to avoid having these problems when it counts – highlighted the Italian-English engineer – tomorrow the program will be quite busy in order to get all the data we need. But from the short rides completed by Max today we know that we are fine-tuning the package ahead of the race“.
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