Report final day of 2022 Pre-season Bahrain testing

Event: 2022 Pre-Season testing
Track: Bahrain International Circuit

It's slightly cooler today on the 6th and final day of pre-season testing, with highs in the mid-twenties but still breezy

While the official action didn't kick off until 10:00 local time, Haas were granted permission to start one hour earlier. That is to make up for the time they lost on Thursday through no fault of their own - their freight was delayed and arrived 48 hours late, leaving the engineers working flat out all night to get the car ready for just the afternoon session on Day 1.

On this final day of pre-season testing the news got out Daniel Ricciardo would not drive for McLaren after being tested positive for Covid-19. The Australian felt too unwell in the first two days to drive. Testing have been so far, quite good for Ferrari here. Carlos Sainz finished on top yesterday (in the standard running) and was second on the first day. Charles Leclerc has had the less favourable morning conditions so far, but will bein the car this afternoon.

Morning test session - final day

Charles Leclerc testing the McLaren MCL36 at Bahrain (day 3)

A lot of teams bolted on their latest updates today to test them out. Alpine used a new front wing. Red Bull had different shaped sidepods, while McLaren was testing different floors and had at last received the much needed new front brakes.

New F1 driver Guanyu Zhou was topping the timesheet in the first two hours of the morning with the Alfa Romeo C42. The Chinese best time was a 1:33.959 min. Which is a great sign for the rookie driver and Alfa team.

On the two hours mark Sergio Perez drove the quickest lap of the test so far of 1:33.105 min on soft tyres. Red Bull's Adrian Newey was also seen in the garage, probably to get the most out this last day.

A solid morning session that, no incident-related red flags to interrupt proceedings, and plenty of laps in the can. Gasly managed nearly a century of laps on his own, before giving way to Tsunoda for the afternoon session.

McLaren appear to in a much better place based on that session, 39 laps for Norris, just ten less than he managed across the entirety of the first day. The only team to struggle were Haas. A fuel system issue was derailing their running.

At the end of the morning session a practice start was organized in which only four cars took part. After two formation laps, one extra because the lights didn't seem to work correctly, Pierre Gasly (AlphaTauri), Sergio Perez (Red Bull), Lance Stroll (Aston Martin) and Guanyu Zhou (Alfa Romeo) did the very first standing practice of the season.

Afternoon test session - final day

Sergio Perez testing the Red Bull RB18 at Bahrain

The last session of pre-season testing showed the Williams team was still doing wind tunnel correlation work as they were covering their FW44 with flow-vis.

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