Bahrain Grand Prix: Practice Recap

Having been announced as MoneyGram Haas F1 Team’s new official reserve driver earlier in the week, Japan’s Ryō Hirakawa stepped up for the first of four planned FP1 outings with the team – Ollie Bearman stepping aside for the session to enable Hirakawa to pilot the VF-25 for the first time having previously tested last year’s VF-24 in Abu Dhabi’s post-season test.

Ocon and Hirakawa ran the same run program in FP1 – starting with a baseline stint on the Pirelli P Zero Yellow tire. Swapping onto the Red soft tire for their next runs, Ocon set his fastest time of 1:34.184 (P5) with Hirakawa producing a best of 1:35.261 (P17) as he acclimatized himself to the VF-25. High-fuel runs on the medium compound wrapped up the opening 60 minutes of practice.

Conditions for FP2 prove more representative of Saturday’s critical qualifying session and Sunday’s race start – second practice commencing early evening at 18:00 local under the lights. Ollie Bearman returned to steering duties and sampled both the medium and softs over the course of the hour-long outing. The Brit produced a quick lap of 1:31.584 on softs to bag himself P9 on the timesheet before a distance run on the same compound through to the checkered. Ocon added another 27 laps in the evening session – the Frenchman setting a best lap of 1:31.870 on softs – to place P16, before sampling the medium on high-fuel to close out his day.

MoneyGram Haas F1 Team ran a total of 93 laps on Friday across FP1 and FP2 – 20 from Hirakawa, 27 by Bearman and 46 from Ocon.

Ryo Hirakawa:

“Having done the post-season test with the team last year was helpful, I already knew the team, so I’ve settled in quickly again. It was quite a different experience from last week as the track temp was very high, so it was quite a tricky session for me. To be honest, I didn’t have time to completely adapt to the car, which was a shame, but still I had a good feeling and gave my feedback to the team. The car is going in a good direction and I’ve got more sessions coming, so I can prepare better.”

Ollie Bearman:

“It was a good session, although I’m slightly struggling to get a good feeling with the car; I had some brake issues I was dealing with for the whole session. It still looks like on low-fuel we’re pretty competitive and we tried to run long with the soft tire, so we’ll see what the data says but I’m pretty happy with today even though I got one session in. I definitely think the new floor is working as expected, which is great, as the team pushed it forward and brought it very quickly. I’m proud of them for that and it looks like we can run the car pretty aggressively now which is great for performance, so hopefully we can keep up the good performance.”

Esteban Ocon:

“It was a difficult session and not really much to read from FP1 but a lot more came from FP2, so we’ll gather more data after today. It was hard for us as we’re still struggling, since Suzuka, with a little bouncing in the car. We’re lacking some top-speed as well, but we’ll keep working to find this for tomorrow. As a team we’re trying our best to figure it out, but at the moment it’s similar to Suzuka.”

Ayao Komatsu, Team Principal:

“Ryo was in the car for the first time with us in FP1, I think he struggled a little bit in terms of braking, but other than that I think he’s done a very good job. His feedback was good, his attitude was brilliant – as professional as we saw in Abu Dhabi – so we just need to look into it before his next outing in Barcelona, what we can do to improve his feeling under braking. In FP2, Ollie was back in the car and straight away picked it up well. He had a slightly different brake issue, but he managed to put together one lap on soft tires, but on high-fuel because of the issue he struggled a bit so we really need to solve the issue tonight. On Esteban’s side, I think he’s reasonably happy but he needs to find a bit more performance. Overall, I don’t think we’re in a bad place, as far as Friday’s go, but we need to solve the brake issue for Ollie and improve the car a little for FP3 and Quali.”