Saudi Arabian Grand Prix
Venue: Jeddah Dates: 18-20 April Race start: 18:00 BST on Sunday
Coverage: Live radio commentary of practice, qualifying and race online and BBC 5 Sports Extra; live text updates on the BBC Sport website and app
McLaren’s Oscar Piastri closed in on team-mate Lando Norris in the championship standings by winning Sunday’s Bahrain Grand Prix.
Formula 1 now heads to Saudi Arabia for the last race of a triple-header, from 18-20 April.
Before that, BBC Sport F1 correspondent Andrew Benson answers your latest questions.
After two calm, controlled victories compared to Lando Norris’ inconsistencies, is Oscar Piastri favourite for the drivers’ championship? – Monty
It is, as Piastri said himself after winning in Bahrain on Sunday, way too early to make any conclusions about the way the championship will go.
What can be said is that Piastri has had an assured start to the season, and at the moment appears the stronger of the two McLaren drivers.
Lando Norris won in Australia, but Piastri was right with him until his unfortunate moment on the grass in the late shower of rain.
Piastri was then excellent in China, probably quicker than Norris in Japan but messed up his final qualifying lap, and was superb in Bahrain.
Norris, meanwhile, admits to struggling with the McLaren car at the moment and had a scrappy weekend in Bahrain.
We explored the dynamic between the McLaren drivers, in the context of Norris’ current struggles, in our post-race analysis piece.
McLaren have in the pipeline a development that they hope will solve the problem Norris is having with the car’s lack of front grip in mid-corner. If it works, it could be him who moves into the lead position in McLaren, as he was last season.
It certainly seems as things stand as if the title fight is between the two of them. As Piastri said on Sunday, a consistent challenger to McLaren has not emerged.
In Australia and Japan it was Max Verstappen. In China and Bahrain, George Russell’s Mercedes was next best, and of course Lewis Hamilton won the Shanghai sprint in the Ferrari.
But it is early days. The first round of upgrades has not emerged yet and that could make a big difference – look at how McLaren’s Miami upgrade transformed their season last year.
And unlike last year, one driver has not created a massive lead in the championship, so it does remain a lot more open than in 2024 at this stage of the season.
Lando Norris moved up from sixth on the grid to third on the first lap in Bahrain and was given a five-second penalty for a false start. Given the advantage he gained, is a five-second penalty enough of a deterrent? John
It’s true that Lando Norris did not appear to lose out too much from his penalty.
He managed to retain his de facto third position at the first round of pit stops and was not that much further behind George Russell’s Mercedes once the race had settled down again than he had been before the penalty was served.
But that is just a brief snapshot that does not fully reflect the impact of the penalty.
You have to bear in mind that strategy played a part here, and so did the relative pace of the cars.
Norris stopped two laps before Russell, and the undercut is always very powerful in Bahrain because of the track’s extreme demands on tyres. That in itself would have gained Norris time – he’d probably have emerged ahead of Russell after the pit stops without the penalty.
And once Charles Leclerc had stopped seven laps later in the Ferrari, he was in a position with a tyre advantage to pass Norris and push him down to fourth place.
The race then unfolded as it did with the safety car.
Bear in mind, too, that the McLaren is the fastest car in the field, which will have helped Norris make up any lost ground.
It would be wrong to tailor penalties to the speed of someone’s car or try to second-guess race situations. The penalty should be the penalty, and whatever happens afterwards happens.
Why do you think Lewis Hamilton is struggling so much with Ferrari? Simon
Let’s take a step back and give this some perspective.
In qualifying, Hamilton is 3-2 down so far to Charles Leclerc at an average deficit of 0.166 seconds.
Given Leclerc is regarded as perhaps the fastest driver over one lap in the entire sport, that’s not too shabby for someone who is finding his way with a new team, even if it is Lewis Hamilton. Bear in mind, too, that Hamilton struggled in qualifying against George Russell at Mercedes last year.
In the championship, Hamilton is seven points behind Leclerc after four grands prix and a sprint.
Then there is the fact that Ferrari themselves have not had the start to the season they wanted.
They expected to continue where they left off at the end of 2024, but McLaren have made more progress and have a significant advantage. Ferrari are in the mix with Red Bull and Mercedes behind them.
Of course, Hamilton has high standards and he expects to be the leading Ferrari driver. He may or may not ever achieve that, but this is what he said after the race in Bahrain about this adaptation to the car and team.
“A much more positive day,” Hamilton said. “The middle stint, I felt really aligned with the car. The balance finally was in a spot where my driving style seemed to be working in that moment. We learned a lot this weekend, actually. More than the other weekends.
“The key is to try to get back to it every weekend. The car really does require a different driving style and I am slowly adjusting to that. And also set-up – I have been a bit all over the place, a long way from Charles the past two weekends and slowly migrating towards him.
“It just feels so alien. We all get stuck in our ways. (I thought) I needed to keep driving the way I was driving and make the car come to me, but it’s not working.
“So I am adjusting myself now to the car. It drives so much different with all the controls we have. You have to use them a lot different to what I had in the past.
“Just one example is I never used engine braking before. Here you use a lot of engine braking to turn the car. They are much different brakes to what I had in the past. In the last stint I had to use the rears to turn the car, and other times you have to put all the weight on the front.
“Qualifying is not good enough but if I get the car where it was in that middle stint, and start delivering qualifying, fix that, I will have better weekends.
“I will keep trying. I will get there eventually.”
What’s the fascination with noise and the desire to return to thunderous noise volumes? I went to a GP in the 1990s and the noise was unbearably loud. Why is it held in such high esteem? It’s not like the present engines are EV quiet. Ash
This is a very pertinent and perceptive question in the context of the current debate about engines in F1.
In a nutshell, what has happened is that FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem was pushing a return to V10 naturally aspirated engines before the end of the next engine cycle – perhaps even as early as 2028.
That has now been kicked into the long grass because a majority of the engine manufacturers were opposed, as they were always going to be.
The manufacturers, FIA and F1 will continue to discuss engines, while waiting to see what the new rules look like next year. These continue with 1.6-litre turbo hybrid engines, but with the electrical component providing close to 50% of the total power output, as opposed to about 20% now.
There is the possibility of some form of simplified engine format being introduced, but likely not before 2029 at the absolute earliest, and more likely 2030 or 2031, which is when F1 is due for a new engine formula anyway.
This new engine, it is now clear, will definitely be a hybrid. But it remains to be seen what size it is, how many cylinders it will have, whether it will be turbocharged, and how big a proportion hybrid will be of the total power output.
A V8, with or without a turbo, and hybrid in the region of 20-30% seems like a reasonable-guess possible compromise as things stand.
A turbo would make more sense in terms of efficiency, which is an important consideration, but it would have an impact on the engine’s sound.
Noise is definitely one of the factors. A certain portion of the fanbase do romanticise the ear-piercing sound of the engines from the 1990s and early 2000s.
But what is not clear is whether that is the majority or not, and how important a consideration it should be.
F1’s fanbase has changed a lot in recent years. There is a new generation of fans and the number of females has significantly increased. On top of that, more and more families are attending grands prix with relatively young children.
Do this new generation of fans want a return to engines that are so loud you need ear-defenders and cannot have a conversation while the race is going on? What about the corporate guests above the pits?
It feels as if certain people were making decisions based on their own prejudices from a time that they happened to find appealing, without properly researching whether it was the right thing to do.
It would perhaps be wise for F1 and the FIA to research this effectively before forming any firm conclusions, because it is clear it would be wrong to make assumptions.
For example, Fernando Alonso made some interesting comments in this context at the Japanese Grand Prix, which have given pause for thought to the powers that be. Or at least some of them.
Alonso won one of his two titles driving a V10 and one driving a V8, and when he demonstrated his 2005 Renault at the 2020 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix he clearly had a lot of fun chucking the car around. It was great to watch.
You might expect Alonso, therefore, to be in favour of a return to those kinds of engines. But that’s not what he said at all.
“I love the the sound of the V8, V10, and, you know, we all experience that, and it’s probably one of the best memories I have from Formula 1 and one of the best cars that I drove,” Alonso said.
“But the world, in a way, has evolved and changed, and there is a different technology now.
“I will be OK with whatever the sport decides, but we need to be careful not just to take only the romantic side of it and just be, you know, pragmatic, and understand that the world is different now and the future maybe is just what we have now.”
What are the main differences between qualifying set-up and race set-up and how do teams balance the two? Glebe
Under F1’s so-called parc ferme regulations, set-up changes after the start of qualifying are basically banned, with very few exceptions.
If conditions remain the same, teams can adjust front wing angles, and whatever settings are on the steering wheel – such as differential and brake balance – but nothing else.
If the weather changes, that all goes out of the window and more changes are allowed.
