The Stake F1 team, with Bottas and Zhou, starts the season in Bahrain, facing challenges and insights during the first practice sessions.
The Stake F1 team officially embarked on a new season as Valtteri Bottas and Guanyu Zhou completed the first two practice sessions of the Bahrain campaign’s opening Grand Prix.
Free Practice 1 unfolded under the Sakhir sun, albeit with a strong breeze contributing to cooler temperatures; in FP2, however, conditions were more indicative of what drivers will face in qualifying and the race… and it did not favor Bottas and Zhou.
10th in FP1, Bottas dropped to 17th in FP2. He also received a reprimand for missing the red light at the pit exit (though he stopped just a few meters too late).
“It was good to finally kick off the season with the year’s first practice sessions and accumulate some more mileage. I think we’ve learned a lot since last week’s testing, working on and discovering more about our car’s settings. Still, there’s additional work to be done, especially on single-lap performance. That will be our main task overnight and during the last free practice session tomorrow morning. It seems we are still quite close to our main competitors, and it will likely come down to a few tenths in tomorrow’s qualifying.”
Guanyu Zhou moved from 15th place in FP1 to 19th in FP2.
“It was good to get back on track for an official session. Today’s conditions were quite different from what we experienced during testing, making it quite interesting. We had a few issues in the morning, but our afternoon went rather well, and we managed to tick all our boxes.”
“Now, our goal is to get everything ready before tomorrow’s qualifying: it’s hard to gauge the real pecking order, as FP2 didn’t reveal the true potential of our performance and, similarly, we don’t know what the others were doing. Once again, it’s a very tight field, and we might have a close qualifying session.”
Stake F1 Bahrain GP 2024. Stake F1 Bahrain GP 2024
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