The 2024 Formula 1 season is officially underway, with the 1st day of the 3-day pre-season test at Bahrain concluding today. While, as a norm, testing times are not considered representative, Red Bull’s performance on day 1 of testing has turned a lot of heads. Max Verstappen, who drove in the morning and afternoon sessions at the helm of the RB20, registered the fastest lap time of the session so far. And his gap to P2 (McLaren’s Lando Norris) prompted ex-F1 Esports champion Jarno Opmeer to suggest that the team was sandbagging already hilariously.
Reacting to a video of Verstappen’s race engineer, Gianpiero Lambiase, smiling uncontrollably after Verstappen took the lead, Opmeer wrote on X (formerly Twitter), “This is the laugh of someone that knows they are sandbagging and still on P1 by 1.1 seconds.”
After 8 hours of running, Verstappen clocked in 1 minute and 31.344 seconds around the Bahrain International Circuit. Norris was more than 1.1 seconds behind the pace of the Dutchman on the same C3 tire compound as the former.
Many expected the Bulls to dominate this year, too, after their historic 2023 season. Naturally, many fans online have already written the 2024 championship off after just two pre-season testing sessions.
Did Max Verstappen expose Red Bull’s ‘sandbagging’ tactics?
Verstappen didn’t just top the table in terms of his lap times. The 26-year-old also got the most running out of all the drivers out on the track, with a whopping 143 laps under his belt. That’s more than two times the Grand Prix distance (57 laps) of the Bahrain GP.
While the Bulls were clearly on top, regarding reliability and otherwise, it could still be that the team is ‘sandbagging.’ It is the norm for teams to run very high fuel loads to mask their out-and-out pace potential. Moreover, the team could also have been running a subdued mode on its power unit and focusing on longer runs more than just pure performance runs.
In any case, both Ferrari and McLaren looked strong. While Red Bull may have been sandbagging, its rivals could’ve played under the radar, too. Hence, as things stand, the Scuderia and McLaren look like possible contenders to dethrone the Bulls in 2024.
