No problems for Ferrari on busy first day of testing

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Ferrari were looking happy with their first day of 2023 pre-season testing on Thursday at the Bahrain International Circuit.

Carlos Sainz was straight out on track in the morning when the lights went green at the end of pit lane and he completed 72 laps before the break for lunch, which saw him go second quickest behind Max Verstappen.

"Overall a positive first day," reported the Spaniard. "Reliability was good and we could run smoothly, covering the whole run plan and gathering valuable data, which is encouraging.

"We progressed well with the setup during the day and we also managed to get good reads on the tyres we tested in Abu Dhabi [at the end of 2022], so overall good progress made so far and I’m looking forward to continuing tomorrow".

Charles Leclerc took over for the afternoon and evening session, and he ended up just 0.014s slower than his team mate after adding 64 laps to the Scuderia's total mileage for the day.

Read also: Verstappen edges Alonso to stay in charge on first day of pre-season testing

"We have a busy first day of testing behind us," he reported. "We completed 64 laps on my side, testing a bit of everything.

"Our focus was on set-up work, combined with some tyre and aero testing, as well as runs with different fuel levels.

We’re going to analyse our data now and I look forward to another session tomorrow".

"It's very early stages but the first feeling was good," confirmed Frederic Vasseur, who took over as Ferrari team principal from Mattia Binotto over the winter.

"The most important thing was to do mileage and we have no issues," he told BBC News. "We were able to do the run plan, and everything is going well."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.