We have left the Bahrain circuit after a great race weekend. The third round of the World Championship of Formula 1 and it seems that we will see a nice fight in this season. Mercedes is still the leading car but Ferrari is very close behind them, taking advantage of any gap to replace that. Saturday the victory was for Mercedes with Bottas being on pole, Sunday was the day of Ferrari with the victory of the German Sebastian Vettel.
Bottas came in first, followed by his teammate Hamilton and Vettel, who was able to pass the British driver in the pitlane, who went thru dirty air. In the start of the Grand Prix Carlos Sainz gained five positions and was up to eleventh, his team mate Kvyat lost seven places and fell to eighteenth. Verstappen made a great start overtaking Felipe Massa and his teammate Daniel Ricciardo. Perez also made good progress in the first two rounds, moving up five positions.
Some drivers retired the race. Not counting Stoffel Vandoorne, as we all expecting problems with the Honda engine. The first to retire from the race was Magnussen, provoking a yellow flag. Vettel took advantage of the situation to make a pit stop. The German tried to overtake Bottas in pit lane. Of late, the men from Ferrari beaten those of Mercedes in terms of strategy. While on the track Verstappen was the next to retire the race. On the next lap, Stroll and Sainz were involved in an accident that had led to the appearance of the safety car. The Spaniard was leaving the pits while the Canadian entered the first corner not seeing the Spanish driver resulting in a collision causing the retirement for both drivers. The stewards decided to penalize Sainz with the loss of three positions on the grid for the Russian Grand Prix and the loss of two points on his super license. An excessive penalty for the first incident in his career.
With the safety car, most drivers take the opportunity to make their stop. I say most because Mercedes made their stops very slow. They did not know how to take advantage of it which was one of the reasons why they lost the race. Vettel was already first, followed by Bottas and Hamilton. Vettel's first position was not the only bad news for the Mercedes team, Hamilton was penalized with five seconds for driving unnecessarily slowly at the pit lane entrance.
On the track Bottas was going quite slowly and it seems that his pace in race was not even close to that of Hamilton. The Englishman lost a lot of time behind his team mate. By the time Bottas allowed himself to take over, it was too late. Hamilton needed a few laps to catch up to Vettel. The pace of Mercedes was superior, but the failures gave the victory to the Ferrari team.
But if there was a clear loser of this Grand Prix, it was Mclaren Honda. Their reliability problems do not seem to have been solved. Vandoorne did not even start the race and Alonso, after only two laps two laps, had to retire from the race because of an engine problem, a situation causing real frustration for their drivers.
In this way we will move on to the Russian Grand Prix, with Vettel in the lead and an open fight for the championship between Hamilton and Vettel. Let's see if in the upcoming races someone will join in on this fight and make it even more interesting.