Come Monday morning, Australia’s Oscar Piastri could be leading the Formula 1 world drivers championship for the first time in his young career.
Starting from pole with teammate and title leader Lando Norris down in sixth after an unpredictable hour of qualifying, if the McLaren drivers finish where they’re set to start — or even if Norris rises to fourth — the Australian will move to top spot at his teammate’s expense.
It would be the first time an Australian has topped the title table since Mark Webber’s stretch in the lead between Italy and Japan in 2010.
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Of course it’s too early in the season to start talking about the championship table. More important, however, is what such a switch — whether it happens this weekend or, as appears almost inevitable, at some other point this season — signifies in the context of this season.
At the fourth race of the season it’s clear the Australian has made an important step forward in his third campaign in F1.
His qualifying deficit to Norris has been erased. In fact he’s making a case for himself as the cleaner executor, especially when the car is outside its sweet spot.
While he hasn’t swept Norris in the races, you can argue credibly he’s been the faster driver in all three to date, plus the sprint in China.
Victory this weekend would mark him immediately as favourite to win in Saudi Arabia next weekend, where he’s always done well, and it’ll be difficult to quell talk of a dynamic of a dynamic shift taking place inside McLaren.
Piastri is on the rise.
‘CLUELESS’ NORRIS LAMENTS PIASTRI GAP
Part of Norris’s mental approach to Formula 1 has long appeared to involve him being very hard on himself. He’s his own harshest critic, but his public self-flagellation has often led to new heights at subsequent races.
After qualifying sixth and a significant 0.426 seconds behind his teammate, a despondent Norris unleashed some of his most scathing self-criticisms.
“I was just slow,” he said. “I’ve been slow this whole weekend, to be honest, so nothing too surprising.
“I’ve just been off it. I feel like I’ve just never driven a Formula 1 car before.
“I’m struggling a lot. I don’t know why. I need to try and find some answers.
“The car’s amazing. I have nothing to complain about. Oscar’s on pole by a good job. I’m thankful for the team. They’re doing an amazing job. I’m just letting them down.”
He later expanded on his struggles, revealing in difficulty gelling with the car.
“Just I’ve been off it all weekend,” he said, per the BBC. “I don’t know why. Just clueless on track at the minute. I don’t know. I just need a big reset.
“I just don’t know how to approach it. I can’t figure it out. Every time I try something it’s good for one session and then it’s the wrong thing for the next session because the wind’s changed.
“I just can’t flow with the car, and when I can’t flow, I’m just not very quick.
“I’ve just got to work on myself. I can’t fault the team, and the car is the best by a long way, but clearly I’m just not clicking at the minute.”
Norris’s struggles aren’t entirely surprising. The Briton has said repeatedly this season that the MCL39 is more difficult to drive than last year’s model, having traded some driveability for raw performance potential.
It’s made the car especially tricky to drive on the limit in qualifying, and we’ve seen Norris struggle to nail his laps first time over several weekends now, whether in qualifying itself or in qualifying simulations during practice.
Piastri has tended to be cleaner in execution. Perhaps Norris is theoretically quicker — his qualifying record last year was formidable — but the tables have turned such that he’s now lacking consistency relative to his teammate.
Team principal Andrea Stella dismissed Norris’s struggles as nothing more than a phase requiring some compromises in approach from both the driver and the team.
“Lando is a very fast driver, a naturally fast driver with an incredible racecraft,” he said, per the BBC. “It’s more a phase, I think, when it comes to Q3, putting together the lap, that hasn’t worked very well recently, but this is a short phase.
“He is just now in this temporary phase in which, while pushing the car to the limit, there’s a few things that don’t go exactly as he expects, and when you go for the extra 0.1 seconds in Q3, this becomes more visible.
“We understand what it is. It will just require a bit of adaptation from Lando himself and some adaptations from the team. But I think the understanding is good, and we are very optimistic that this will be resolved.”
The good news for Norris and the team is that McLaren’s advantage was always going to be at its largest during the race here given its excellent tyre usage in what’s expected to be a two-stop race of high degradation. Bahrain is also a good track for overtaking, meaning Norris should have relatively little trouble moving forwards.
A podium finish will be enough to retain his title lead from Piastri, but it’ll take more than damage limitation to keep the Australian down from here.
FERRARI SHOWS SIGNS OF PROGRESS DESPITE HAMILTON FLOP
George Russell qualified second and was dreaming of a chance to pass Piastri off the line to take the lead into the first turn, but both he and teammate Andrea Kimi Antonelli were penalised one place each for being sent to the end of the pit lane too early following Esteban Ocon’s Q2 red flag. They’ll start third and fifth respectively.
Into an almost unbelievable second slots Charles Leclerc for comfortably Ferrari’s best grid position for a grand prix this year.
“Honestly, I didn’t expect P3,” he said before the penalty was applied.
Ferrari has brought a major upgrade to Bahrain focused on the floor, but Leclerc said some set-up experiments conducted over previous races were also beginning to bear fruit for him.
“I think it’s the result of a lot of work,” he explained. “I’ve gone in an interesting direction set-up-wise, which seems to help me to extract a bit more out of the car. That’s what I’m trying to do every weekend.
“It seems to be better and better, which is a good sign for the future.
“I know that at the factory they’ve been pushing like crazy to try and bring this floor a bit earlier on, and that definitely made the difference, because if I look at the gap with P4, it’s not that much, and I’m pretty sure that without the floor I wouldn’t be P3.
“I’m curious to see what it will do tomorrow; however, it’s probably not the best track to extract the maximum out of this new upgrade, but in the next few weekends we shall see more of it.”
But the story was far less optimistic on the opposite side of the garage.
When Leclerc heads to the front row, Lewis Hamilton will line up ninth after qualifying a whopping 0.597 seconds behind his teammate.
It’s an extension of the Briton’s difficult Ferrari transition, the only real bright spot of which was his sprint pole and victory in China two rounds ago. Other than that he’s been comfortably eclipsed by Leclerc and at times way off the pace.
Having eagerly anticipated — and positively reviewed after practice — the Ferrari upgrade package, the seven-time champion had no-one at whom to point the finger but himself.
“Our car clearly is a lot better than what I’m delivering with it, and Charles did a great job with it today, so big apologies to the team for not doing the job,” Hamilton said.
Glum, Hamilton said he “really [has] no idea” what to expect in the race.
Until now Hamilton’s struggles have been easily masked by Ferrari’s own early-season difficulties, with neither driver able to perform consistently.
There’s a hint now, however, that Leclerc is getting to grips with the car, particularly with the new parts. Hamilton hasn’t been able to follow him.
It’s too early to draw conclusions, but it would be timely for Hamilton to find a big Sunday performance to get the ball rolling.
BIG CHANCE FOR ALPINE AFTER FIA FUMBLES PENALTY
It takes a lot to frustrate Williams boss James Vowles, but the FIA managed to get in his bad books this weekend with a bizarre sequence of officiating during qualifying.
Three drivers had their first laps deleted at the end of Q3: Antonelli, Hamilton and Nico Hülkenberg.
Hülkenberg had been eliminated from Q2 and obviously hadn’t set a lap in the pole-getting session.
The Sauber driver’s infringement actually came way back in Q1. His fastest time of that segment was deleted for the German overstepping the track boundary at turn 11.
That lap had snuck him into Q2 by just 0.042 seconds ahead of Alex Albon. Without it he would have been 0.027 seconds behind the Williams driver and eliminated from Q1.
When the FIA made its late decision, it dropped Hülkenberg to 16th — where he should have been eliminated — and promoted Albon to 15th, last of the Q2 finishers despite not having had a chance to participate.
Carlos Sainz, who’s been half a step behind Albon so far this season, comfortably made it through to Q3 and qualified eighth. There’s every chance Albon would’ve been there with him had Hülkenberg’s lap been deleted before the start of Q2.
“We got it wrong,” the FIA said candidly after qualifying, explaining that turn 11 hadn’t shown up as a hotspot for track limits during practice and thus wasn’t monitored as actively as some of the other higher risk turns.
But for Williams the mea culpa was cold comfort.
“It’s frustrating because Q1 is ever-so tight now,” Williams boss Vowels told Sirius XM. “We didn’t get the best lap with Alex, but it was a top ten car today.
“Some of the laps, you can see from the FIA, they were very quick to respond on — [Max] Verstappen, [Yuki] Tsunoda — and typically their timeline should be seconds after it happens.
“Good question on why this one wasn’t, because the impact is: brilliant, [Hülkenberg has] moved behind us, but that’s of no bearing to the fact that we’re probably six to eight places out of position, and that hasn’t been corrected, and it won’t be corrected either for tomorrow.“
Not only did it miss out on what would have been just its second double Q3 appearance of the year — and not only did Albon suffer his first Q1 knockout of the year — but Alpine, the team expected to be Williams’s biggest rival for fifth in the standings, will line up fourth and 11th with Pierre Gasly and Jack Doohan respectively.
While Gasly will probably struggle to retain such a lofty starting position, a clean race and good strategy should see him score heavily. Doohan, after his career-best qualifying result, is a great chance of scoring maiden points.
Williams has accumulated 19 points to sit fifth in the standings, while Alpine is yet to score, but the French-owned team looks likely to take a big bite out of that advantage thanks to a combination of its own strong performance and a big slice of bad luck for its British rival.
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