Red Bull Racing
Max Verstappen started the defence of his FIA Formula One World Championship title with victory in the Bahrain Grand Prix 2024 season opener on Saturday as Mexican teammate Sergio Pérez made it an Oracle Red Bull Racing 1-2 around the Sakhir circuit.
After the first round of pit stops, Verstappen – starting on pole – held a 5.458s lead over teammate Pérez, with Visa Cash App RB F1 Team’s Yuki Tsunoda back in 11th place after 19 laps and Australian teammate Daniel Ricciardo battling it out in a close group back in 16th place.
Max Verstappen, Driver, Red Bull Racing
It was a special one today. These kind of days don’t happen that often where the car feels spot on, including the balance and feeling of the car and everything went really well. The start was good and then we also looked after the car really well, so it was an enjoyable race for me. We managed to find a good rhythm and pace on this track and the wind strength and direction helped me extract a bit more from the car. This is one of our strongest circuits and looking to Jeddah we know that the track there is very different, with a lot of high speed corners and less degradation. I am hoping we can bring the same performance to next week: it’s going to be a challenge but I am looking forward to it. We have to thank everyone at the factory who has contributed to a great start to the year. It is always a big challenge to build a new car and follow up such an unbelievable season, but I’m excited to kick things off this season with a win.
Sergio Pérez, Driver, Red Bull Racing:
It was a really strong race from the Team, it’s a great start to the season, you can’t get better than a one-two to start a year which looks like it’ll be a really tight battle. I overtook Carlos at the start and from there we were able to chip away at things. There were a few issues that we need to iron out, but it is just important to keep the momentum with us now. From my side it is good to have a full race distance behind us now because there will be a lot of learning to do on how we manage tyres, how we push and then we can go from there. We had a good pace, but I think it is going to be track-dependent. I just want to keep improving because the season is long.
JODY EGGINTON – Technical Director, Red Bull Racing
A frustrating race in many ways. We need to go through the data and review points in the race where we could have maybe taken advantage of our closest competitors. Daniel was struggling a bit with his car balance in the first couple of stints, and we need to understand the factors influencing this. Daniel did make good use of his soft compound tyre in the final stint to get himself back to the group, but overtaking was not easy, and he ran out of laps to move forward. Yuki’s car balance was better and his pace was looking pretty reasonable in the first phases of the race, running well in the middle group and looking after his tyres quite well. However, we need to review in detail the middle phase of the race, including how Lance (Stroll) and Zhou (Guanyu) took advantage in the laps following the last round of stops. This cost some track positions, which we could not recover in the final part of the race, in this way missing the opportunity to fight for 10th place. In summary, the weekend has been solid, with the package able to perform reasonably well in the midfield battle, but we can’t help thinking we have not managed to extract everything from tonight’s race, so we leave Bahrain disappointed. There is a lot of work to do between now and next week’s race in Saudi Arabia, but at the same time, with it being so soon, we also have the opportunity to react and apply our learning from this event quickly.
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