2024 Formula 1 Bahrain Grand Prix Highlights

Max Verstappen went on to bank a comfortable victory by 22.457s and claim the fastest lap to earn 26 points with 18 for Pérez in second as Ricciardo got past Tsunoda to finish in 13th and 14th place respectively at the finish.

Daniel Ricciardo

We were not quite good enough for points today. I struggled a lot at the beginning of the race with the used soft tyres because there was a pretty poor grip off the line. In the middle stint with the hard tyres, we got a little bit more pace, but I anyway felt that I was struggling. In the end, the new soft compound was a lot better. We finally extracted some pace and were catching the pack. At that point, I got a little stuck behind other cars and I lost the grip on the tyres. The call for the drivers’ swap was quite expected and came with no surprise. Before the race, we obviously talked with the team about strategy plans, and it was highly likely I was going to finish the race with a new set of soft tyres after starting the race with a used set. It is what it is, and let’s turn the page now. I’ve got an idea of what we can do to be better, so I’ve some confidence in going racing next week in Jeddah.

Yuki Tsunoda

I think I was doing quite well within the points until about halfway through the race when I felt it was slipping away from us. We weren’t fighting for points at that time, so we’ll have to review everything during our post-race analysis and learn from it for the future. It’s race one, so there’s still lots of time to understand. In general, there’s still a lot we can take away from this weekend. The mechanics did a great job with all our pitstops, and if there is anything we could do better strategy-wise, we’ll review and improve for Saudi.

Laurent Mekies – Team Principal

Overall, a tough Saturday where the midfield was tighter than ever. The fight for P11 was a hard one, with eight cars involved at times! In the early stage of the race, we felt we could have had a good go at it, with Yuki doing a good job and driving up to P10. We lost a few positions as the race went on and struggled to pass our competitors in the final stage of the race. We had Daniel on a new set of soft tyres for that final stint and we swapped our cars to give ourselves a chance to overtake Kevin (Magnussen) and Zhou (Guanyu) but ultimately it was not enough, and we had to settle for P13 and P14. We know that it is only race one, but we will certainly review how we could have extracted more from our car and our pace today. There are more positives than negatives in our first weekend as Visa Cash App RB and everyone is pushing very hard in Faenza and Bicester. Any hundredths of a second gained in the midfield is going to make a significant difference.

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