Charles Leclerc left Bahrain’s Wednesday morning session with the headline time, a 1:33.739 that put him three-tenths clear of Lando Norris as Formula 1 kicked off its final three-day pre-season run ahead of the 2026 campaign. It’s testing, so nobody’s handing out trophies, but Ferrari won’t mind starting the week looking tidy and immediately on the pace.
The lap came early and, crucially, it didn’t look like a “one-and-done” special. Leclerc piled on 70 tours across the morning, giving Ferrari a decent blend of performance and workload at a point in the winter when most teams are trying to nail correlation and clean up the car’s behaviour on lower fuel, rather than chase a single glamour number.
Norris ended up closest on a 1:34.052, and McLaren’s session had the slightly scrappy feel of a team still working through scenarios rather than chasing the stopwatch. Norris had a couple of notable moments: first, running up behind Esteban Ocon on the pit straight in a realistic “in-race” proximity test, then a hefty lock-up as he arrived at the pit entry at speed. The lap time is still right there, but the morning suggested a car that can be quick while still demanding a bit of respect on the limit.
Kimi Antonelli slotted into third for Mercedes on 1:34.158 with 69 laps, which will please the team more than the position itself. There’s a quiet competence to that kind of mileage at this stage, and Mercedes looked like it got through its programme without the kind of interruptions that can derail a test day.
Behind the top three, the pace spread out quickly. Alex Albon put Williams fourth with a 1:35.690, while Pierre Gasly logged 61 laps for Alpine. Haas had Ocon circulating steadily, and Racing Bulls’ Arvid Lindblad ended the morning with 75 laps — the sort of number engineers love, even if it doesn’t spark much social media excitement.
The backdrop to all of it, though, was how raw these 2026 cars can look in the slow stuff. Even with this being the fourth day of running in Bahrain, the rear ends still don’t appear fully tamed, and drivers continue to flirt with the edges of what the new-gen packages will tolerate. Nico Hulkenberg offered the clearest reminder, taking his Audi through the Turn 4 gravel at one point as he searched for the limit in conditions that punish any hint of imbalance.
And then there’s the starts — already a major subplot of the winter. With the MGU-H no longer in the mix, several drivers have been wrestling with getting the cars into the right launch window, particularly in managing revs and bite cleanly. Hulkenberg even had his car stall in the pit lane during a practice start, an awkward moment that neatly underlined how much of the “old normal” has been taken away and how much muscle memory needs rewriting.
While Ferrari, McLaren and Mercedes racked up the useful kind of morning, others spent it staring at screens in the garage.
Aston Martin’s running stopped after 28 laps for Fernando Alonso, the team confirming a power unit-related issue it was checking. In a three-day test you can lose a morning and still recover; in a six-session sprint to Melbourne readiness, giving away half-days starts to feel expensive, particularly when everyone is still trying to understand how these cars behave across different fuel loads and tyre states.
Red Bull’s Isack Hadjar had an even rougher time on mileage, sidelined after 13 laps amid a reported water system problem. There’s no need for alarmism — weird little failures are part of testing — but the timing is unhelpful when the entire paddock knows how much groundwork is required to make a new regulation set look effortless.
Cadillac’s morning was the strangest on paper. Sergio Perez didn’t record a lap in the opening hour, with the team citing sensor issues. He eventually emerged just before the two-hour mark, only to head straight back in, and ended the session with 24 laps and a best of 1:38.191 — a time that’s essentially irrelevant without knowing what was on the car and what the run plan looked like. Still, it’s never ideal to spend the first morning of your final test parked up, even if the root cause is something as mundane as a sensor refusing to play nicely.
A late Virtual Safety Car period that was subsequently noted as a red flag turned out to be a systems check rather than an incident, and the session wound down with Leclerc still on top, Norris having closed the gap, and Antonelli quietly in the mix.
Day four morning times won’t predict the first qualifying of the year — they never do — but the shape of the session mattered. Ferrari looked clean and purposeful. McLaren was quick, if slightly messy in the details. Mercedes got on with the job. And for Aston Martin, Red Bull and Cadillac, the most valuable commodity of this week — time on track — proved annoyingly easy to lose.
