The speed of the RB20 in the world champion’s hands during practice and qualifying has further highlighted the advantage he has over the opposition currently.
Despite a pretty close fight for the top grid spots – Charles Leclerc’s best Q2 lap would actually have been good enough for pole position – few are anticipating much hope of holding a candle to him around Sakhir on Saturday.
As Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz said about the deficit to Red Bull in qualifying appearing closer than last year: “Let’s wait until the race. I think that’s where they suddenly level it up and that’s where they manage to have degradation that no one can have, and a race pace that no one can have.
“I think last year, if you look at the last eight races: in quali, we were always there, within reach of them, and this year we felt again within reach in quali [pace]. In the race? We’ll see.”
But if the performance deficit to Verstappen has left rivals feeling their chances are minimal, there is further bad news for them, because Red Bull also enjoys a tyre strategy advantage heading into the grand prix.
Almost slipping under the radar, Red Bull chose to avoid an early soft tyre run in final free practice and used a hard tyre instead.
Verstappen and Sergio Perez are the only ones who have used a new soft for the race, while all their main opponents have only used one.
For a high-degradation track like Bahrain, it would seem counterintuitive to feel that extra softs are a benefit, but things fall that way here because the medium is not an especially good tyre for the race.
As Pirelli’s Mario Isola explained: “The medium is very close in terms of delta lap time with the hard but with higher degradation. That means that there is no real advantage with it.”
The medium’s characteristics therefore push the frontrunners towards the soft, especially for the start and opening stint.
Isola added: “I believe the majority, or at least the cars in front, will start with the soft because otherwise they lose too many track positions.
“The lap time delta between the soft and hard is big. The soft/medium is 1.2s, and the medium/hard is 0.3-0.4s, so it means that you have 1.5 seconds between the hard and soft. That is a lot.
“So if you start with the hard, and you are in front, with some possibilities for overtaking, then you start to lose track positions.”
The strategy pointing to soft being the tyre of choice for the first stint, with extra grip away from the line – allied to the extra tyre life it offers – gives Red Bull a quite decent cushion compared to the others.
Sainz estimated that Red Bull had an advantage of around two or three seconds over the first stint.
Plus, it also indicates that Red Bull is choosing to use the same soft-hard-soft strategy that it successfully utilized to dominate last year. Others who have two hard drives available may opt for the more conservative route.
Red Bull’s car design, its long-run form and the tyre strategy choices all culminate in leaving the rest of the field accepting that there is one clear favourite the first F1 race of 2024.
George Russell, who will start the race from third place, said: “The gap in qualifying was probably slightly closer to Max than we all expected, but I think race pace is the important one. We’re expecting probably a half-second deficit. That’s what we thought after testing.”
Isola responded quickly to question about whether he had seen anything in the data this weekend that indicated someone would challenge Verstappen.
“Max is very strong, I cannot tell any lie,” he smiled. “You can see that from the lap times, both during the test and also yesterday. I hope that the others are close but I believe he still has an advantage.”
