Bahrain Friday Review: Consider this your annual reminder...

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Five days after an epic in China, the F1 grid gets back at it with the “Consider this your annual reminder that Bahrain exists” Grand Prix. No, I don’t know anyone from Bahrain. Neither do you. Alas, the charade continues for another year.

In the wake of Fernando Alonso announcing his participation in the Indy 500, Thursday kicked off with a confirmation from McLaren that Jenson Button would return for Monaco. Having retired at the end of last season, Button’s return will undoubtedly be a popular encore for fans of radio communications that vary between unintelligible and complaints of “massive understeer”.

Unfortunately, the car he’ll be driving is bound to be awful, but I’m sure the racer in JB will enjoy a final dance around Monaco before his engine fails on the eighth lap. At least he won’t have to travel anywhere.

Speaking of returns, Bahrain also marked the return of long-time F1 supremo and bad toupee-aficionado Bernie Ecclestone to the paddock. The 86-year-old wasted no time getting back into his sh!t-stirring ways, professing he would’ve blocked Alonso from going to Indianapolis. Some things never change.

Moving onto the on-track action, Friday practice in Bahrain is a bit of an odd affair, as while the race and qualifying are run at twilight, the first practice session takes firmly under the midday sun, where the only thing hotter is Felipe Massa in a speedo.

As such FP1 is quite a tentative affair, although it was notable for 1. Daniel Ricciardo’s Borat impression (“attack-a the box-a”) and two engine failures, the first being the usual McLaren blow-up (you think Alonso made the right choice?), the second, more alarmingly, being to Kimi Raikkonen’s Ferrari. It took the Ferrari Mechanics a full three hours to resolve the issue, which is certainly something to keep in mind as Sunday approaches.

Raikkonen’s engine aside, Ferrari were able to top the timesheets with Sebastian Vettel finishing 0.041s ahead of Mercedes’ Valtteri Bottas – albeit with Lewis Hamilton’s hotlap ruined by Nico Hulkenberg taking a nap on the racing line. Whether the Scuderia’s well-publicised aero upgrade has made a difference is another question entirely, and one that remains unanswered.

For the third-straight race weekend, we saw another T-wing fall off, this one belonging to Bottas’ Mercedes. While their ugliness is undisputed, calls to ban them on safety grounds have had mixed reactions, but after Bottas’ managed to shred the floor of Max Verstappen’s Red Bull, hopefully some progress can be made.

With less than a second separating the top 8 in FP2, there’s every hope for a fascinating Saturday. Will Ferrari keep their advantage? Have Red Bull narrowed the gap? Can Lance Stroll drive with a burned backside? Tomorrow we’ll find out.