2024 Bahrain Pre-Season Testing – Day Three

Dave Robson, Head of Vehicle Performance: We had a good day to complete the pre-season test. We did another 120 laps and this time without any car issues. Alex was able to build on the work done by Logan yesterday and continued to evolve the FW46. Across a range of fuel loads, the car was behaving well, and Alex was able to complete a decent race simulation using two of the tyre compounds that will be available next week.

Inevitably at this time of year, there is a lot of scope to push the FW46 harder and to develop it quickly. We have a few days to analyse the data from this week and decide how we build the cars for FP1 and how we look to introduce the first round of car updates. There is a lot to do but we have made a solid start and have a good foundation to build on.

Alex Albon: Firstly, we’ve got a decent car to go racing with. I do think we struggled a little bit with the car across day one and two with just how different it is, struggling to rebalance it, but we made some big headway in making the car more driveable. With the changing car characteristics, we shifted some of our historical problems to different areas. Still, we’ve been able to fix some of these but unfortunately in the process, we’ve picked up a few things we didn’t like. Despite this, we did a bit of a radical set-up today and this worked out for the better. Looking at the rest of the grid, the midfield has closed up a lot with everyone making a big jump from last year, so it’s all quite equal throughout the field. This year is going to be all about the fine details and potential tracks that better suit others, so there are going to be lots of interesting battles.