The three days of pre-season testing ended under floodlights at the Bahrain International Circuit. The last day of the test saw Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz complete a total of 143 laps, or 774 kilometres, which makes the total distance covered by the team this week 417 laps, or 2,257 kilometres. The SF-23 will therefore tackle the first Grand Prix weekend of the season with over seven race distances already in the bag.
Morning. Charles was out on track shortly after 10am local time (8 CET) and for the majority of his session, he ran the C3 compound while continuing to work on car set-up. He actually started off on the harder C2 tyres, as well as doing a qualifying simulation on the C4 compound, with which he set his best time of 1'31”024. He completed 67 laps (363 km), bringing his three day total to 199 laps (1,077 km).
Afternoon. In the lunch break, the SF-23 was then configured for Carlos who spent the afternoon working first in qualifying trim before switching to race configuration. The Spaniard alternated between the C2 and C3 tyres, before switching to C4s, with which he set his best time of 1’31”036. In the final 90 minutes, Sainz completed a race simulation, bringing his total number of laps for the day to 76 (411 km) and for the whole test to 218 (1,180 km).
Charles Leclerc #16
We have three very intensive days of testing behind us. The first day was all about running big scans and trying to understand how well our data matches what we predicted at the factory. What we learned is that there is quite a good correlation.
We focused a lot on set-up work this week and made some good steps forward. I also tried out some different driving styles to test what suits me best in this new car.
We’ll be back next week for the opening race of the season and it will be interesting to see where all teams stand in relation to their closest competitors.
Carlos Sainz #55
We finished the test without any issues and completed the full run plan that we had for these three days. So first of all, thank you very much to the entire team here and in Maranello. Today we focused on both short and long runs to finish the assessment of some of the parameters that we wanted to test. Now we will focus on analysing the data, in order to arrive at the first GP of the year as well prepared as possible. I’m looking forward to racing here next week.
Frédéric Vasseur, Team Principal
It has been three intense days of work for everyone in the team. We have scanned a number of items on the car and ticked many of the boxes of our programme, without worrying about lap times or what the others have been doing, simply focusing on ourselves. The main target was getting as much mileage under our belt as possible and we did that, although it’s also true that you always want to do more and have more time. But it’s the same for everyone. Whenever we managed to put everything together the performance seemed to be there, but we are clearly still in the process of getting to know the car so it’s too early to say anything.
The mood in the team is perfect and we are in a good shape to start this long season.