full engine change<\/a> on day two that limited Kimi Antonelli to just three laps.<\/p>\nThat meant Mercedes started the final day of the first test at Sakhir with the second-lowest lap count of the 11 teams.<\/p>\n
But Russell was among the first out when the session began, and was the first driver to show a serious turn of pace. He set a 1m34.821s 20 minutes into the session, then on his next run took almost three quarters of a second off that time.<\/p>\n
He then went faster still just as the second hour began, becoming the first driver to lap below the 1m34s mark with a 1m33.918s.<\/p>\n
Lewis Hamilton followed that up by setting his personal best time of the test for Ferrari, slotting into second, 0.291 seconds off Russell.<\/p>\n
As was the case on Thursday morning, the first red flag of the day was caused by Cadillac.<\/p>\n
This time, Valtteri Bottas had what appeared to be a mechanical failure and took to the runoff area at Turn 11, just before the end of the second sector.<\/p>\n
Bottas looked under the rear of the car as he got out, before the Cadillac was lifted up and craned \u00a0away across the gravel trap.<\/p>\n
Max Verstappen ended the first hour with the third-fastest time for Red Bull, 1.423s off Russell, but behind him and fourth-fastest Ollie Bearman (Haas) a number of other drivers also registered their fastest laps of the week.<\/p>\n
These included Carlos Sainz (Williams) and Liam Lawson (Racing Bulls) in fifth and sixth – with Sainz recording an early day-high 22 laps – and Franco Colapinto, who was eighth-fastest for Alpine, 4.483s off Russell’s best.<\/p>\n
Oscar Piastri got his first timed laps of the day in just before the turn of the hour and was seventh fastest in the McLaren, 3.749s off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"George Russell set the fastest time of the first Bahrain Formula 1 2026 test so far in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":477037,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-477036","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-motosport","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-motor","11":"tag-motor-sports","12":"tag-motosport","13":"tag-motosports","14":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/477037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}