Five Things to Know About the 2025 Bahrain GP

Formula 1 is back to the site of pre-season testing, with the Sakhir circuit hosting the 2025 Bahrain Grand Prix this weekend.

A lot has happened since our three days in February, with Alex and Carlos both scoring points and the team enjoying our best start to a season since 2016.

Atlassian Williams Racing will look to continue that form for the second portion of this early-year tripleheader. Here's what you need to know before we go.

Bahrain and Saudi Arabia were the opening two rounds of F1 over the last three seasons before Australia returned to be the curtain-raising event in 2025.

These two rounds are night races, meaning F1 spent the first weeks of its recent years under the stars for the competitive action. Not so in 2025, with Australia, China, and Japan taking place during the day.

This weekend's evening timeslot will be the first time we'll see the FW47 racing under the floodlights. You can see the sparks flying and the lights shimmering in night races, and we're looking forward to the striking imagery over all three days.

Night racing might be visually impressive, but there's the little matter of dealing with wide temperature fluctuations for our engineers and drivers.

FP1 and FP3 are at 2:30 PM and 3:30 PM local time, respectively, which won't give a true representation of the sunless conditions for Qualifying (7 PM) or the race (6 PM).

Forecasts show a vast temperature delta of 13°C on Friday, with the high mercury mark set to touch 36°C ahead of the first Free Practice session.

Understanding the tyre performance and lifespan will be a challenge for the team to get on top of before lights out, which will instead see the ambient temperature continually drop from around 28°C.

The Kingdom of Bahrain's main island of the 83 in its archipelago sees a notable split between its northern half and southern.

Visiting fans will see the city lights slowly fade as they travel south from the airport to the track, with Bahrain International Circuit's location in the Sakhir Desert.

There is nearly nothing but dunes surrounding the circuit. Yet, a few surprising points of interest hide in the desert.

Tourists can visit the Shajarat-al-Hayat, the Tree of Life, a 400-year-old tree that defies the country's low rainfall and somehow thrives with green leaves. Jabal al Dukhan, or the Mountain of Smoke, is Bahrain's highest point, just east of the track, and sits 134 m above sea level.

We'll see the Atlassian Williams Racing Driver Academy returning to support F1 in Bahrain after no Academy action in Japan.

Formula 2 and Formula 3 resume their seasons following their Melbourne opener, where Luke Browning and Alessandro Giusti kicked off their campaigns.

Another Atlassian Williams Racing representative joins the duo in Bahrain as Victor Martins wears the W for the first time since becoming an Academy member at the end of March.

Our latest recruit secured F2 pole position in Australia to show his speed, but the heavy rain cancelled the Feature Race and any chance of turning that P1 start into a victory.

Victor and Luke both won in F3 machinery in Bahrain before. Can they do it in F2, and might Sandro follow in their Formula 3 footsteps? Find out this weekend.

Although last year's Bahrain Grand Prix didn't see a slowdown from any crashes or mechanical failures, we've seen a lot of VSC or full Safety Car periods at the circuit recently.

Curiously, there was a notable increase in their deployment since the track switched to night racing in 2014 after a decade of daytime driving, with just a single Safety Car featuring in the 2007 race.

More well-behaved driving after a 2014 crash lasted until the 2017 Grand Prix, which kicked off annual VSC or Safety Car periods, including at the one-off 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix.

2024 ended an eight-race run where the drivers couldn't spend every lap going flat out. Will we see a return in 2025?