We’ve become used to seeing a Red Bull with a bigger performance advantage on race day than in qualifying in the previous two seasons. This first race of 2024 suggested the same pattern. In a car in which he could easily have lost out on pole to Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari, Red Bull’s Max Verstappen finished 25s clear of the best non-Red Bull.
Verstappen thinks that contrast between qualifying and race was made even starker by the changed conditions of Saturday. In Friday’s qualifying session the wind was gusting, making Turns 4 and 13 in particular very difficult. By Saturday the wind had died down and turned through 90-degrees.
Verstappen felt that had made a bigger difference to his Red Bull than the others. “It brought the car a bit more to how it had been in testing,” he explained. “It just worked really well today.”
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Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz finished third, not far behind Sergio Perez’s Red Bull. He was not so surprised at the outcome despite how apparently close Ferrari had looked in qualifying. "I’ve been testing here for three days and seen through the practices that their tyre degradation on the softs was about the same as ours and everyone else’s on the hard," he said.
"I could see they had three or four-tenths advantage [on a stint]. They also kept a new set of softs for the race. I knew they’d be very difficult to beat… They could keep the C3 tyre alive, were overheating it a bit less. Maybe that’s what makes it so fast in the race. We need more samples. Look at late last year and our front rows and poles. But even then, Red Bull were gone in race. I hope it’s not as exaggerated this year."
When talking of the 2022 and ’23 Red Bulls, Adrian Newey confirmed that this bias towards race performance at the expense of qualifying has been deliberate and is built into the DNA of the cars.
“We made that decision back in ’21 when we were designing the ’22 car, to try to prioritise the race performance over one-lap performance. It was a deliberate choice and we felt that if the overtaking was going to become easier [with these regulations] then that presumably meant qualifying performance would be slightly lower priority than in the past and it seems to have worked out.”
The race pace of all these cars – because they are relatively heavy, have enormous torque from their hybrid engines and huge high-speed downforce – is inevitably determined by their tyre temperatures. The Sakhir track is the sternest test of rear tyres the cars see all year.
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The abrasive surface combined with the long, fast sweeps of Turns 5-6-7 and 11-12-13-14, interspersed by two hairpins with big traction demands and not much straight in which to recover means the tyres are always on the verge of overheating. The driver has to drive to the tyre temperature.
The better spread of downforce the car has, the less it will tend to overheat the surface of the tyre. The aerodynamic map of the car – how the downforce is delivered at the different ride heights and attitudes it sees – determines this.
A car with a better spread of downforce should be able to lap faster for a given tyre temperature. But it can be that this very progressively-delivered downforce does not put enough energy into a new tyre over a single lap of qualifying to fully exploit its grip.
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If we compare the Red Bull and Ferrari in qualifying and then in the race, we can see the extent of this difference.
Qualifying
In this case we compare the Verstappen pole lap with the lap Charles Leclerc did in the Ferrari in Q2 which was actually 0.014s faster than the Dutchman’s Q3 time.
Essentially the Red Bull is faster on the straights, the Ferrari faster around the turns. The two straight line sections of Sector 1 favour the Red Bull and by the time they arrive at the braking point for Turn 4 Verstappen is already 0.324s ahead. Leclerc has to make all that up and more in the remainder of the lap – which he does. Here’s how.
The Ferrari is 7km/h quicker at the apex of Turn 4 (127km/h vs 120). Entering the fast downhill section at Turn 5 Leclerc is overlapping throttle and brake far more intricately than Verstappen, never going below 30% of braking capacity, with Verstappen almost off the brakes entirely. Leclerc uses this to manipulate the weight of the car to give him the rotation he seeks.
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Through the fast Turn 6 the Red Bull is actually 1km/h quicker at the apex but the Ferrari gets into the corner better and takes less time to complete it. The Ferrari is braking later into the Turn 8 hairpin and even though its apex speed is 2km/h slower (partly as a result of the later braking), that’s not enough for the Red Bull to overcome the Ferrari’s faster approach. It’s the same into Turn 10, the Ferrari significantly later on the brakes and gaining significant time (0.088s) on entry even though the apex speed is slightly lower.
Turn 11 is the big one though. Leclerc is not only later on the brakes and faster into there, he’s a full 7km/h faster at the apex (170km/h vs 163) and in fifth gear rather than fourth perhaps to give him more modulation of the car’s balance if it has more understeer than the Red Bull. This is the biggest gain on the lap for the Ferrari.
Turn 13, fourth gear, and the Ferrari is 6km/h faster at the apex. The Red Bull is faster on the straight again despite entering it slower, then they brake at about the same point for the final turn but the Ferrari is again slightly faster through the corner.
The Red Bull’s exits are always better, though. Although Verstappen is earlier on the brakes into most of the corners, he’s also earlier on the gas. Their apex speeds through the final corner are the same, but by the exit the Red Bull is already travelling 5km/h faster and that speed advantage just keeps building all the way down the straight.
Across the finish line he’s 7km/h faster and that advantage stretches to 9km/h (helped by a tow from Oscar Piastri worth 0.15s) before the Red Bull approaches its terminal speed, allowing the Ferrari to reduce that advantage to just 3km/h by the time they hit the brakes for Turn 1.
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The Ferrari power unit derates just before Turn 4 and again between Turn 4 and Turn 5. Its unusual small turbo/long inlet configuration helps give great low-down response but isn’t as efficient at feeding the battery. Those two derates cost only a couple of hundredths of a second on this Bahrain lap.
Verstappen put the lap in when it mattered but Leclerc was potentially slightly faster.
Race
Unfortunately, Leclerc was hindered in the race by a severe brake imbalance across the front axle. Sainz had a lesser brake problem and he’d got it stabilised by the second stint.
Driven to the rear tyre temperatures rather than to the grip limits over a single lap, the comparison between the Red Bull and Ferrari now looks very different.Although their race average is only around 0.5s different, in the hard tyre second stints, Verstappen’s 13-lap average is actually 0.78s per lap faster than Sainz’s.
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If we take a lap from each of them around half-way through those respective stints, we get the following:
The Red Bull pulls out 0.1s through Turn 1, a further 0.2s through Turn 4 where the apex speed of the Ferrari is 13km/h slower than that of the Red Bull – having been 7km/h faster than the Red Bull there in qualifying.
By the time they go through the downhill sweeps – which take massive energy from the tyres – and reach the Turn 10 hairpin, the Ferrari is now 0.743s behind. From there until the end of the lap it loses no further time to Verstappen, but whereas it was conclusively faster through Sector 3 in qualifying, now it’s only equal. Even through Turn 11, it’s no faster than the Red Bull and both are now taking that in fourth.
As can be seen, the difference in how the two cars compare is quite stark between qualifying and race and puts numbers on the very different ways they use the tyres.
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