Racing Point: On the back foot with plenty of work to do

Perez was 14th in both sessions, while Stroll improved from 16th in the morning to 17th at the end of FP2.

This is what the drivers and team chief had to say at the end of day one at Sakhir.

Sergio Perez: “It’s been a challenging day to start our Bahrain weekend. We need to work hard to find a few tenths overnight and improve the balance of the car, otherwise, it’ll be very difficult to reach Q3. The sessions earlier in the day, FP1 and FP3, are not that relevant because the temperatures are so much higher than what we expect for qualifying and the race, so the opportunities to work on the set-up are limited. We tried lots of things on the car today, which will help our learning in the long term, and we collected all the usual tyre information ahead of the race.”

Lance Stroll: “It wasn’t easy today. We need to review the data and work hard to understand where we can find some more performance. The first session was very busy with big changes to the car – running different aero parts – and trying to understand the best direction for the rest of the weekend. We know it’s very competitive in the midfield so we have to find some speed tonight if we are to be in the top ten tomorrow.”

Otmar Szafnauer, CEO & Team Principal: “As always in Bahrain the early practice session was run in very hot conditions and wasn’t really representative of the conditions we will experience for qualifying and the race. As such, we elected to treat FP1 largely as a test session to evaluate some different aero and mechanical updates."

"We split the items between the cars, carried out some floor changes during the session, and continued to learn about the car. Our performance during the evening session suggests we are a bit on the back foot with the car balance so there’s plenty of work to do tonight.”