Fernando Alonso had his fans dreaming of future glory after the Spaniard beat favourites Red Bull and put Aston Martin top of the timesheets in Friday (March 3) practice for Formula One’s Bahrain season-opener.
The 41-year-old double world champion, who made his F1 debut before McLaren’s Australian rookie Oscar Piastri was born and who will be making a record-stretching 356th start, lapped the Sakhir circuit in one minute 30.907 seconds.
The time on soft tyres was 0.169 quicker than Red Bull’s double world champion Max Verstappen.
“Yeah, it felt good. Obviously, it’s good to see the times and that you are competitive,” said Alonso, who took his titles with Renault in 2005 and 2006 and joined Aston Martin from Alpine at the end of last year.
“At the moment, we are just concentrating on ourselves.”
Alonso had set the second-best time in the first daylight session, behind Red Bull’s Mexican Sergio Perez who was third later on under the floodlights.
The Red Bull drivers were separated by just 0.002 of a second.
“Yeah, a difficult start of the day. I mean, FP1 was really bad. Just couldn’t get a balance, which is a bit odd because in testing, whenever we tried – OK some things were maybe not amazing, but not that far out. So, a few things to understand”, said Verstappen.
Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc was fourth fastest with German veteran Nico Hulkenberg, starting his first full season since 2019, fifth for Haas.
Alonso’s team mate Lance Stroll, back in the car despite breaking both his wrists in a cycle accident last month, was sixth.
The Canadian appeared to be struggling to turn the wheel at times, however, and Piastri had to take evasive action at one point.
Once-dominant Mercedes had two lacklustre sessions, with seven times world champion Lewis Hamilton 10th and eighth respectively and team mate George Russell 11th and 13th.
“We found out we were a long way off. We kind of knew that a little bit in the test. But it’s a big gap. I’m trying everything I can out there, it just is what it is. So, we’re just going to try to work at it,” Hamilton said.
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