While chaos reigned on the one side of the Red Bull garage in the aftermath of Alex Albon’s high-speed crash during the second free practice session of the 2020 Bahrain Grand Prix weekend, on the other side his teammate Max Verstappen was getting business done at the sharp end of proceedings.
Has there ever been such a gulf between teammates than the one that exists between the Dutchman and the Thai driver? Read about Alex’s cars here>>>
Despite Lewis Hamilton dominating the two sessions on Friday, Mercedes may have been keeping their powder dry as they evaluated test parts and also sampled the Prielli 2021 rubber during FP1.
Nevertheless, Max did well to split the Black cars on the timing screens three-tenths of a second down on Lewis’ effort and fractionally faster than Valtteri Bottas.
Max said in the team report, “I had some test items on the car in FP1 and we didn’t complete quite as many laps as we wanted but the second practice was better. You never have a perfect balance and there are still quite a few things to understand, but in general it has been a positive Friday.
“Mercedes are quick but that is no surprise and from our side we will just focus on getting the best out of our car and in the race as it can be aggressive on tyres around here. We tried some of the 2021 tyres in both sessions but it is difficult to know which compounds we were running.
“We were a bit all over the place in terms of grip and balance but that is something Pirelli can look at and it is the point of doing these tests,” added Max.