McLaren, Aston Martin fail to impress in Bahrain Qualifying

While the Scarlet red Ferraris stole the limelight at the Bahrain GP Qualifying, there were serious questions about the teams that didn’t quite get their regulations right.

The McLaren duo of Lando Norris and Daniel Riccardo failed to make it to Q3 with the Aussie driver failing to make it out of Q1. Riccardo who was struck with covid during last week’s preseason testing clearly showed how precious seat time really is. The McLaren driver managed a disappointing p18 at the end of the qualifying session. His teammate Lando Norris fared a bit better in the 13th.

This comes as a blow to the orange team who are aiming to expand their trophy cabinets and return to their winning ways. In recent weeks, the team struggled with front brake issues and the team feels that this is still a problem with the car. “The car itself, the platform is working well. Mechanically, it’s fine. Aerodynamically, it does what it’s supposed to do. What we need is more grip, we need more grip, mechanically, we need more grip aerodynamically” said Technical director James Key.

 

Things were worse off at the Aston Martin Garage. With the team failing to get both cars out of the bottom 5. Nico Hulkenburg, who is standing in for a covid hit Sebastian Vettel managed to finish above Lance Stroll in a car which he did not drive before Friday. “You drive to what the car offers you and as a team, we’ve got some homework to do, some pace to find that I came out of quali saying I produced a lap. There were no mistakes, I got everything from the table, and I feel I achieved that. That gives me satisfaction for today.”

Mike Krack, Chief Operating Officer added “We are obviously disappointed by today’s qualifying performance, but we will work hard this evening to see what we can do to optimize our race pace and strategy for tomorrow. There is not a lot more to say at this stage, but we are racers and we will work as hard and as fast as possible to remedy the situation.”

 

The team claims that they are losing over half a second to porpoising issues, a new issue that has emerged with the redesigned cars of this year.