Formula 1: The GOAT

”Hello and welcome to Bahrain, where the cast is assembled for the first round of the 2021 season, just over three months on from the two races held here in the 2020 season. We are back at the Sakhir circuit, and we are just minutes away from the first practice session ahead of the first race of the year.

A 5.4-kilometer circuit carved out of the desert, famous for its long straights and heavy brake zones, it has three DRS zones and 15 turns. Turns 1 and 14 are arguably the most difficult,” Natalie Pinkham could be heard on the F1 live feed as she became the first woman to lead commentary on an F1 official session.

She slowly moved to different events that happened on the track at different corners as the incidents themselves were shown on TV, starting with the 2016 Bottas incident and moving to the Hamilton and Rosberg incident, and finally, the 2020 incident after Grosjean’s crash.

As the feed moved to showing the three compounds, C4, C3, C2, that have been selected for the weekend, she continued, ”Bahrain will be Pirelli’s four-hundredth grand prix, and 2021 is the final season of the 13-inch tires, being replaced by the 18-inch from next year. Well, I cannot wait to get the season underway; the level of excitement is palpable...”

As she continued the intro before moving to Karun, Fatih was calmly watching the free practice session from their home in Surrey, England, having not traveled with the team to Bahrain when they left for the second time.

Although it was 2:30 PM in Bahrain, it was only 11:30 AM in England, so he had taken a short break from his scheduled lessons to watch the free practice. Despite him not being on the track, he wasn’t that saddened by it since he was left back here for a specific reason.

Setup: That was the reason he was left here and not in Italy or in Bahrain. Despite the team being based in Italy, a large portion of their operations still took place in England’s Motorsport Valley, specifically in Milton Keynes. Other than the wind tunnel, the simulators were also located there.

Per the schedule, he was expected to head there in the evening to spend the night trying different setups while using the two free practice data sets as the basis before the start of FP3 the next day, where they would test the most promising one before choosing which setup to use for qualifying and the race.

It was the second-best option, since he had wanted to be on the track to watch the races from an engineer’s angle, but he was left with the second-best option, which, if looked at through a certain lens, could be considered the best.

Had he been in Bahrain, most of his inputs would be taken as opinions, and despite his proof of knowledge, they were yet to take his every word as a fact. But while at Milton Keynes, the situation would be different because, depending on what he did there, he could directly affect the performance of the car in Bahrain.

”When are we leaving?” he asked Alex, who was watching it with him, along with his grandmother, who was with them in the living room. She looked more interested in spending time with her grandson than what was happening on the screen, evidenced by all the questions she kept asking Fatih whenever she saw or heard something she didn’t understand.

”We should leave after FP1 and arrive there while FP2 is still ongoing so that we can get started as fast as possible with the same setup they are going with in FP2,” Alex said, but his eyes were still on the screen, which at the moment showed Gasly entering the track in the yellow AlphaTauri.

”Let’s see first what we have,” Fatih said as he yawned and stretched himself before focusing back on the feed. Having been driving the car in very weird setups for four hours every day for the past two weeks without stopping, he could say that other than God, he was the one who knew the car better than any driver on the team, and he looked forward to seeing how the car kept improving race after race.

...

At the start of the session, everyone seemed to be taking their time getting into the rhythm, setting times in the 1:34s until half an hour in, when the teams finally started improving, gaining time after each run. Nearly half the grid returned to the pit lane for some setup changes or repair of damaged parts, but the times started getting faster and faster. With ten minutes to go, Norris was in the lead with Leclerc in P2, with a gap of 0.02s, before finally Gasly moved to P3, followed by the expected top runners, Hamilton in P4 with Verstappen in P5.

But now seemed to be the time when teams were finally pushing.

”Hamilton on the lap here down toward turns nine and ten, no lock-up on this occasion,” Karun Chandhok said as the feed finally changed to show Hamilton on a push lap.

”You can hear the floor hit the ground a little bit where the floor taps the brakes,” Jenson Button chimed in.

”He’s gone fastest of everyone in sector one, by the way, on this lap, and he now chucks it into the left-hander at turn eleven, but the rear is once again not with him as he tries to pick up the power. Second sector comes up, and he is thirteen thousandths down on Norris’s time, but it is his personal best. Bottas is a bit slower on sector one while Perez has gone very quickly in the middle sector, and with eight minutes on the clock, everyone is pushing...”

”OHH!!! Scrappy run throughout the corner there,” the two commentators shouted when Hamilton had a very bad final turn. Button added, ”You don’t lose just in the corner but all the way to the start-finish line,” just as Hamilton passed the line, moving to second on the timing board with a 1:31.921 before the feed moved to Bottas coming out of the final turn and onto the start-finish straight. He crossed the line as the timing popup focused on him changed its number to 1, showing he had set the fastest time of 1:31.692.

But just as they were talking about that, the feed once again changed, showing Gasly in the middle of the second sector. His first sector on the pop-up time board showed green, with him being only a tenth down on Hamilton’s fastest sector one, attracting their attention.

”The Yellow Bulls in AlphaTauri have shown quite a bit of form from two weeks ago, and they seem to have a more stable car compared to two weeks agoOOOOH,” Natalie Pinkham shouted as Gasly hit the curb, sending the car spinning a full 360 before he caught it, going wide into the escape area in sector two before finally returning to the track.

He drove very slowly, aborting the lap, and moments later, the feed changed to showing Max finally leaving the pit and entering the track on soft tires to go for his push lap. Lo and behold, by the time he finished his lap, he was ahead of Bottas by three-tenths, with purple sectors one and two, as the commentators highlighted the Red Bull.

”That car looks like it is finally at the level of challenging Mercedes, as it seems to have dealt with the twitchiness of last year. But it is still early in the season, so I can’t fully say with confidence, as the other guys have been champions for the whole of this engine regulation. Honda delivered well last year, and if they can do the same this year, this season stands out to be very interesting,” Jenson Button said as the checkered flag was waved a few minutes later, bringing an end to the first free practice session.