Kimi Antonelli’s first proper taste of being the quickest man in a Mercedes on an official F1 test came with a neat bit of timing: late afternoon in Bahrain, the track cooling, the headline writers circling — and the team publicly insisting Red Bull has already handed everyone a “reality check”.
If Mercedes are trying to shift expectation elsewhere at the start of this new rules era, Antonelli didn’t read the script. He jumped into the W17 after lunch and promptly went to the top, edging teammate George Russell to seal a Mercedes one-two on the final day of the opening Bahrain test.
Russell had laid down the morning marker in what was his last run of this test, punching in a 1:33.918 that became the new overall benchmark. That lap carried a familiar pre-season subtext: quick enough to be noticed, not so quick you can’t still shrug and say “it’s testing”. Then Antonelli took over and removed even that wiggle room, matching Russell before dipping underneath it with a 1:33.669 to finish the day fastest and set the quickest lap of the three days.
The on-track story had plenty of the usual Bahrain testing clutter — long runs, short runs, drivers finding the edges of unfamiliar cars — but there were a few moments that told you how raw 2026 still is. Lewis Hamilton, back out in the Ferrari, had a hefty lock-up into Turn 1 that left him with a flat-spotted front-right and an early return to the pitlane. Liam Lawson, logging a busy day for Racing Bulls, found trouble of his own with a spin at Turn 8. Nothing dramatic, but a reminder that these cars can still bite in the wrong corner with the wrong inputs.
Hamilton’s day ultimately ended in more visible fashion. After racking up a mammoth 150 laps — the kind of workload teams crave in February, even if it looks mundane on a timing screen — he pulled over out of Turn 4 and stopped at the side of the track, mirrors flashing, bringing out a late red flag. Ferrari will care far more about the mileage banked than the optics of a stoppage in testing, but it did cut into the final rhythms of a session that was otherwise settling into long-run housekeeping.
Behind the Mercedes pair, Hamilton was the nearest challenger on a 1:34.2 as the final hour approached, with Oscar Piastri climbing to fourth after finding a chunk of time compared to his morning running. Piastri’s day was all about volume as much as pace: he ended it with 153 laps, the sort of number engineers love and drivers tolerate.
There was a brief flash of wheel-to-wheel, too, albeit the polite kind you get when everyone knows it’s February. With DRS open, Piastri moved past Lance Stroll into Turn 1. Stroll had already been candid earlier in the week about Aston Martin’s situation, suggesting the team needed to find four seconds. Even by the forgiving standards of testing, it’s a big admission — and the kind of quote that hangs in the air when you see an Aston Martin still hunting while others look closer to “baseline”.
Stroll did at least find a hefty personal improvement later on, knocking 1.8 seconds off his earlier best to get down to a 1:38.1, before returning to the garage with 69 laps completed as the session entered its last half hour.
The wider paddock chatter is still circling the same axis: who’s genuinely quick and who’s leaning on the annual art of misdirection. Mercedes has been talking up Red Bull’s form, with Russell referencing the “reality check” they’ve delivered. Max Verstappen, for his part, has hinted that rivals are “hiding” to make Red Bull look even better than it is. Add in Lando Norris praising the Red Bull engine, and you can see why Mercedes’ quickest laps land with a bit more weight than the team would probably like.
Still, that’s the thing about a new cycle: you can try to manage the narrative, but the stopwatch has an awkward habit of interrupting. Antonelli topping the day isn’t a championship forecast — nobody serious pretends it is — yet it’s a tidy early statement in what is inevitably going to be a closely watched season for Mercedes’ young recruit. He didn’t just look competent; he looked comfortable enough to go and take a headline when the opportunity was there.
After the red flag and a brief resumption for FIA procedures and practice starts, Bahrain’s first test wound down without further drama. The lap times will get pulled apart and cross-examined over the next few days, as they always do. But the simple takeaway from Day 3 is hard to dress up: Mercedes finished on top, and it was Antonelli who put them there.
