F1 latest news LIVE: Mercedes to ‘take a chainsaw’ to W13 and Lewis Hamilton rules out Saudi GP win

Apart from the two Red Bull cars who both experienced power failures, AlphaTauri’s Pierre Gasly was the only other car to retire from the Bahrain Grand Prix.

Here’s how the race ended for the Frenchman:

Mercedes manage to finish third and fourth in the 2022 Formula 1 opener in Bahrain but they struggled throughout the race with ‘porpoising’. A phenomenon seen this year when the car violently bounces on its suspension at high speed.

George Russell, who finished fourth behind Charles Leclerc, Carlos Sainz and Lewis Hamilton, suggested Mercedes could be stuck with the problem for the rest of the campaign.

“This bouncing we are experiencing down the straight is slowing us down because we are smashing into the ground, rather than going forward,” he said.

“It is promising to see that other cars have had the same issue and they managed to solve it which means there is a solution there, but we are struggling to find it.

“It would have been brilliant if we solved it in testing where we had so much running. But we truly just don’t know how long it will take, if it is next weekend or after the summer break.

“We hope it will be as soon as possible, but there is no reason why it may not continue the whole year.”

Max Verstappen criticised Red Bull’s reliability issues after a disastrous end to the Bahrain Grand Prix saw the reigning world champion and teammate Sergio Perez both forced to retire.

Verstappen had seemingly secured a second-place finish behind Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc only for his car to lose power with two laps to go, while a similar problem caused Perez to spin out at the first corner soon afterwards.

Speaking to Sky Sports after the race, a bitterly disappointed Verstappen said: “Of course you can always say problems can happen and you might have a retirement.

Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz says he found the opening weekend of the Formula 1 season difficult despite a second place finish in the Bahrain Grand Prix.

He confessed to not being able to extract as much speed out of the new F1-75 as his team-mate, Charles Leclerc, and is at a loss to explain just why he is encountering such difficulties now.

“In FP1, FP2 and FP3 I was very far behind, the most far that I’ve been ever in Ferrari, and that’s why even with a 1-2 that we scored, I’m not entirely happy with the weekend,” explained Sainz.

“As a Ferrari driver it’s been my most difficult weekend and it just shows that I need to put my head down, understand this car, understand where is Charles making the difference with his driving and the way that he’s approaching the corners and driving the tyres, also in the race.

“I need to improve if I want to fight for a win and I will put my head down and try to do some steps coming into Jeddah. Can I improve it from one weekend to another? I think I can improve it.

“Can I cut down the deficit completely? It’s a very good question. I wish I can and I will be working hard for it.”

Charles Leclerc has revealed that he played a prank on Ferrari’s engineers as he rounded the final few bends to take victory at the 2022 Formula 1 season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix.

Leclerc ensured that Ferrari’s preseason promise carried over as racing began at the Sakhir Circuit, surviving the challenge of Max Verstappen in an early duel and then holding his nerve and speed to secure the win.

It was the Monegasque’s third victory in F1, but his first since 2019, and suggested that his Italian team may well be able to challenge Mercedes and Red Bull.

Formula 1 team Haas have sent a Happy Birthday message to driver Mick Schumacher as he turns 23 today. Schumacher joined Haas for the 2021 season and achieved a personal record finished for the American team when he came 11th in Bahrain on Sunday.

Ferrari aren’t just back, they’re “properly back”. Carlos Sainz wanted to spell it out, clear and simple, after helping the Italian team to a sensational one-two at the Bahrain Grand Prix. As even though impressive performances in pre-season testing and a pole position for Charles Leclerc in qualifying had generated excitement, a team of the size, history and prestige of Ferrari would not have truly returned until they were stood at the top of the podium on the opening weekend of the season.

It has been two full campaigns since the standings were coloured with the famous red of the Scuderia and few wins this year will be as popular as Leclerc’s as Formula One entered its new era this past weekend. The whispers that Ferrari had taken the biggest step forward following the overhaul of regulations ahead of the start of the 2022 season were confirmed as Leclerc held off the challenge of Max Verstappen, before the defending champion’s dramatic late retirement led to Sainz joining his teammate on the podium.

We may be only one step into what is scheduled to be a record 23-race campaign but the early narrative has been set and the rest of the field are already playing catch up. Last year in Bahrain, Verstappen’s duel with Lewis Hamilton set the tone for what would be one of the most competitive title races in F1 history, one that went right down to the wire in Abu Dhabi. Meanwhile, Ferrari were watching, planning and getting ahead of the competition. The two seasons of sacrifice hurt but this was a reward for their patience.

Aston Martin’s new AMR22 car for the 2022 Formula 1 season is a “disaster”, according to ex-Formula 1 driver Ralf Schumacher, who blames the team’s desire to change too much too quickly for what he believes is a drop towards the back of the grid.

While Ferrari and Red Bull competed for victory in Bahrain at the first race of the new F1 campaign on Sunday, Aston Martin were mired at the back of the field with the likes of Williams and McLaren, and never looked capable of challenging for points. In 2020, the team, then known as Racing Point, finished fourth in the constructors’ championship and took a win at the Bahrain circuit.

F1 has entered a new era of car design for 2022, with revamped regulations designed to all drivers to follow one another more closely and race harder. That means every team has created their machinery for this season entirely from scratch, and while some previous backmarker teams like Haas and Alfa Romeo appear to have nailed the transition, the first race suggests Aston Martin have dropped backwards.

Toto Wolff has described Mercedes’ opening race result in Bahrain as “fantastic” and said that the team are “punching above their weight” at the start of the 2022 F1 season.

Lewis Hamilton capitalised on the retirement of both Red Bull drivers to finish on the bottom step of the podium, closely followed by new teammate George Russell, who took fourth in his first race as a permanent member of the German team.

Despite a clear lack of speed compared to the fastest cars on the grid, it represented a good start for Mercedes, who have struggled to adjust after aerodynamic regulations were overhauled during the offseason.

Formula 1 chief Ross Brawn said he was “delighted” with the racing on show in the season-opening Bahrain GP following the introduction of new technical rules for the 2022 season.

The new cars have been completely re-designed to try and improve racing and overtaking opportunities. Promisingly, the drivers did find it easier to follow one another and there were plenty of head-to-head fights in Bahrain, including between Charles Leclerc and Max Verstappen who were vying for the lead at the time.

“We’re delighted,” said Brawn, speaking to Sports F1. “It is the first race so we’ll have to be careful, but all the signs are we’ve moved in the direction we wanted to move in and the ability of the cars to race each other, from what we’ve seen, is improved.

“I think in the past we’ve always focused on cost, safety, performance – but now we should focus on raceability because there’s never been any attention paid to it. We need to do that now, we need to do that in the future.”