Bahrain 2 – THE POINT…BY GIAN CARLO MINARDI

The last session of testing in Bahrain is over. The world Championship can start. The first event of the Championship will start in 15 days.

Formula 1 has never been as mist-shrouded as it is this year. That makes real values unclear to us, even though one thing is certain: there’s still a lot of work to do and reliability is the biggest unknown thing. Nobody is fully satisfied with the work done, neither Mercedes nor Caterham, so that makes us understand how unintelligent it was not to arrange more test sessions.

In the second session of Bahrain testing, teams ran many more km than in the first session (a total of 2314 laps in the first session and a total of 3280 laps in the second session) and they were much more performing. Day by day teams become more and more competitive, however we still don’t know anything about the first event of the Championship to take place in Melbourne. I think that for the first few events the motto will be “slow and steady wins the race”.

During the second session, time gap between teams became narrower and narrower. All cars managed to qualify within the 107% rule, but there’s still a huge time gap between Ferrari-Mercedes and the Renault-powered teams. Red Bull had more problems than Toro Rosso, Lotus and Caterham, even if the teams’ situation are different. Red Bull have to defend a world title, unlike the other Renault partners who have different goals. So, the exasperation of performance may have been different.

By Mercedes, the FW36 and the W05 almost set the same lap time; we also don’t have to forget McLaren, even though it is impossible to draw up a standing. Since Mercedes and their partner teams completed many more laps than Ferrari and their partners (1462 laps completed for the Mercedes four partners, in comparison with 948 laps completed by the “Ferrari club”), we can say that the German power unit is much more performing than the Italian one. If we compare the Scuderia to the Mercedes Team, we see that the Brackley-based squad outpaces the Maranello-based team, with the former completing 351 laps and the latter 337.

In two weeks the Circus will fly to the other side of the world, so, we’ll see what it’s going to happen.

May the show begin!