The Kingdom of Bahrain is home to the Bahrain International Circuit and home of the first race of the Formula 1 schedule. The Bahrain International Circuit has hosted FIA Formula events since 2004, in which the first F1 race in the Middle East was held. The 5.412 kilometer or 3.36 mile track designed by the rather infamous Hermann Tilke, and provided a dramatic Lewis Hamilton victory in last year’s event along with giving Sergio Perez his first career victory in 2020. Coming into the first race weekend of 2022, many teams still had concerns about their car and many things to still test but the on track preparation had expired and each team would have to bring whatever they had to the battle of Bahrain. Coming into this season many would expect the usual suspects of Mercedes and Red Bull to dominate the field as they had for years, but new cars and regulations had revealed some problems for the almighty Mercedes as they struggled to keep pace throughout testing. Teams with Mercedes power units overall performed poorly as the power unit struggled to take advantage of the new aerodynamics package of the 2022 car. Mercedes tried to remedy this by bringing out a completely different car for final testing and race weekend, drastically reducing the size of the side pods and moving the mirrors further outwards to try and make the aero package closer to their 2021 spec.
Qualifying
Ferrari dominated qualifying as 4 of the top 7 cars in the field had Ferrari power trains, but the Scuderia Ferrari topped the charts with Charles Leclerc, putting in a best time of 1:30:558. Verstappen split up the Ferrari duo in 2nd, but Carlos Sainz was only six thousandths of a second away from the lap of Verstappen. The rest of the top ten in order was Perez, Hamilton, Bottas, Magnussen, Alonso, Russell, and Gasly.
Lights Out
On the first lap of the race Esteban Ocon received a 5 second penalty for initiating contact with Mick Schumacher. During the first 3 laps of the race the leading 3 remained the same but Lewis Hamilton had already charged past Perez, who fell down to 6th. The biggest loser of the start was Valtteri Bottas who fell to 14th after a rough start. Yuki Tsunoda moved up 4 places within the first 3 laps, placing his Alpha Tauri into 12th place after missing out on the second session of qualifying. Max Verstappen pitted on the 15th lap attempting to undercut Charles Leclerc, who would pit 1 lap after Verstappen, the undercut paid off as by lap 17 Verstappen had caught up to Leclerc and was able to pass him coming off of the race’s fastest lap at the time. Leclerc was able to retake 1st position before the end of the lap but Verstappen took advantage of DRS and overtook on the front straight of lap 18. Once again Leclerc retook, but the DRS was too powerful as Max was able to fly past the Ferrari, but a lockup cost Verstappen the place, one which Leclerc would hold up until the end of the race. Pierre Gasly had a complete engine failure on lap 46 that removed him from the race and destroyed his race for points, he was forced to pull over as his engine began to overheat and catch fire, luckily the Frenchman was able to escape unharmed as the safety car was brought while the track marshals swiftly put out the flames. Racing restarted on lap 51 as Leclerc led with Verstappen than Sainz behind. Verstappen pulled out his rather common restart strategy of crowding the leader as an attempt to get the best jump off of the leader’s restart, but his slow final corner drew him further from Leclerc. Sainz was able to jump ahead of Verstappen as Verstappen had a power loss failure on lap 55. Sergio Perez spun going into the first corner on the final lap which allowed the field to overtake and forced him to the back. Hamilton was now up to 3rd as his teammate Russell was behind him in 4th, and the Ferrari’s still led 1 and 2. Charles Leclerc crossed the line first with Carlos Sainz behind him in 2nd finishing the Ferrari one-two. The Monegasque collected his third Formula 1 win, as Sainz collected his 6th podium finish. Kevin Magnussen gave Haas their first points finish since Romain Grosjean’s 9th place finish in the 2020 season. Ocon finished 7th despite his 5 second penalty and his teammate, Fernando Alonso finished 9th. Both the new Alfa Romeo drivers scored points with Valtteri Bottas coming back from his slow start to finish 6th and with Zhou Guanyu, finishing 10th, earning points in his first F1 race. Finishing order as follows: Leclerc, Sainz, Hamilton, Russell, Magnussen, Bottas, Ocon, Tsunoda, Alonso, Zhou
