Carlos Sainz, a race car driver from Spain, had a great day testing for the Williams team on Thursday in Bahrain. He drove more laps than anyone else and beat the time set by Lewis Hamilton, a famous driver who won the world championship seven times. Hamilton recently took Sainz’s old spot at Ferrari, another racing team. Sainz’s fast lap around the Sakhir desert track was 1 minute and 29.348 seconds. That’s a big deal for Williams, which finished second-to-last out of 10 teams last year.
Sainz drove 127 laps, which is like racing two full races. A lap is one trip around the track. No other driver did more than 100 laps. The day started with rain and wind, making it messy. “A bit of a stop-start day with the rain all the time, in Bahrain, which is weird,” Sainz said. Rain is unusual there, so it slowed things down. Still, he finished all his planned driving and feels ready for the first real race on March 16 in Australia. “I feel as ready as I can be with a day and a half of testing and we will try and push flat out in Australia,” he said. “Flat out” means going as fast as possible.
Hamilton was fastest in the morning when it was wet, but his best time was a tiny bit slower than Sainz’s, by 0.031 seconds. He drove 45 laps and is getting used to Ferrari after leaving Mercedes. “We’re making strong progress in understanding the SF-25 and learning how to get the most out of it and the reliability is good so far which is a really positive sign,” Hamilton said. The SF-25 is Ferrari’s new car, and “reliability” means it’s not breaking down. Ferrari’s boss, John Elkann, watched the testing. His team hopes to win a championship this year, something they haven’t done since 2008.
This was the second day of three total days for testing before the season starts. Teams test their cars to make sure they’re ready. Each team does different things, like using more or less fuel, so times don’t always show who’s best yet. Charles Leclerc from Ferrari drove 84 laps and came in third. George Russell from Mercedes was fourth overall after being second in the morning. His young teammate, 18-year-old Andrea Kimi Antonelli from Italy, was fifth.
McLaren’s Lando Norris, who was fastest on Wednesday, ended up 14th on Thursday. He started a fast lap but stopped partway, so he might have beaten everyone if he’d finished. McLaren’s boss, Zak Brown, talked to Sky Sports TV: “We have good innovation on the car. We have not stood still in the winter and I am excited to see it all work. So far so good but it’s obviously early days.” “Innovation” means new ideas to make the car better. He said, “We have tried to enhance what we had but there is some stuff on there I don’t think has been totally noticed yet, which I think will happen in due course.” This means they’ve added secret improvements that people will see later.
Other drivers did well too. Lance Stroll from Aston Martin was sixth. Liam Lawson, the new teammate of Max Verstappen at Red Bull, drove 91 laps and came in seventh. Jack Doohan, a new driver from Australia, and his Alpine teammate Pierre Gasly were eighth and ninth. Isack Hadjar, a rookie from Racing Bull, finished 10th. There was a small crash in the morning between McLaren’s Oscar Piastri and Sauber’s Nico Hulkenberg, which doesn’t happen often in testing.
Sainz’s big day helped Williams look strong as they get ready for the racing season!
