Ferrari executives had admitted it in half a word last season: 2021 was a year of transition, 2022 would see the horse rear up again. Charles Leclerc’s pole was the Scuderia’s first kick. Its victory, Sunday March 20, confirmed that the thoroughbred was perhaps a crack in power. The reigning world champion, Max Verstappen, tried to tame the animal but the Dutchman had to give up a few kilometers from the finish, leaving the Maranello firm to sign the double. Struggling throughout the race, Lewis Hamilton miraculously made it onto the podium.
Very quickly, however, Leclerc and Verstappen put a world between them and the rest of the peloton. There were only the Ferrari and the Red Bull on the Bahrain night. Far, much further, Lewis Hamilton was battling with a wayward Mercedes. “I have no grip with these tyres”, confined himself to coldly noticing the Briton on the radio. Far behind the other two leaders’ teammates, Sainz and Perez, the seven-time world champion has long been the first of the “others”. Not sure that would satisfy him. Badly born, the Mercedes has work to do to catch up on Ferrari and Red Bull.
The spectacle offered by the two leading single-seaters, between the 17th and 20th laps, gave a clue of what this season could be: a high-flying duel, on the razor’s edge, between a Monegasque prince and a Batavian king . Returning to Leclerc’s wheels thanks to the first pit stop, Verstappen activated his DRS, dropped the Ferrari at the end of the straight at the cost of locked braking, and took control… before giving them three more turns. late to a Ferrari that had managed to stay in the wings. This pass of arms, the most beautiful of a Grand Prix finally quite monotonous except at the end, was repeated identically the following two laps and was worth the trip in itself.
If some wondered if the title of world champion was going to calm down the Dutchman, the latter had just provided a scathing answer. But, despite all its panache, “Mad Max” had to lower its flag. Much more comfortable in the winding sections, the red car was unplayable this Sunday. And it was not the intervention of the safety car, eleven laps from the finish, and after the minor fire aboard Pierre Gasly’s Alpha Tauri, which this time was going to serve the interests of Red Bull. On the contrary. Yet back in the wheels of the leading Ferrari after the release of the track, Verstappen could not try anything, too busy to contain the assaults of Carlos Sainz Junior in his exhausts.
And while the Austrian firm scrapped to secure 2nd and 4th places, everything was going to collapse in a few hectometres. It was first Verstappen who saw his single-seater suddenly deprived of battery, and all his competitors pass in front of him. Then, in the process or almost, Sergio Perez, then 3rd, made a mistake, definitively cutting the wings of Red Bull. Lewis Hamilton, never in the game and yet on the box, scored points that may be worth a lot of money at the end of the season. But for now, it is Ferrari who, with this first double since the Singapore Grand Prix 2019, strikes the first big blow of this season.