GAME ON: Red Bull’s pace for real as Verstappen beats Hamilton for premier pole of 2021 at Sakhir;  Bottas P3 ahead of Leclerc’s improved Ferrari

The 2021 Formula 1 season is upon us after a long, cold winter and events on track wasted no time heating up during Saturday qualifying for tomorrow’s opening round Bahrain Grand Prix. It was time to find out if Mercedes had been hiding their pace in relation to the seemingly ascendent Honda-powered RB16 B Red Bull chassis. It took three rounds of quali to answer that compelling question but in the end Red Bull superstar Max Verstappen laid down the gauntlet by putting together a seamlessly fast final lap, wresting pole away from seven-time champ and Mercedes ace Lewis Hamilton by a fairly cushy six-tenths of a second. Coming off his season-ending victory last year in Abu Dhabi and with a winter’s worth of upgrades to the Red Bull, Verstappen looks like he finally has the finely honed weapon to compete with Hamilton and the Silver Arrows for at least the Drivers’ Championship if not the Constructors’. The Dutchman will be keen to continue his momentum and hunt down a victory in tomorrow’s debut contest of 2021 to show that the German behemoth will not have things their own way this year after absolutely dominating the modern hybrid era.

It was not all good vibes for team Red Bull, however, as they saw Mercedes number two Valtteri Bottas recover from some discomfort with his new W12 mount to set a solid final time good enough for P3, while their new hire Sergio Perez succumbed to the curse of being Verstappen’s stablemate and got bounced in Q2. The veteran Mexican, who was brought in to the team after a superlative season last year to add consistency and stability to the troublesome number two Red Bull pilot role, will have to start a disappointing P11 tomorrow, with a lot of ground to be made up if he is going to help his teammate hold off the dual Silver Arrows onslaught. To be fair to Perez, the team may have botched his strategy by sending him out on the Medium Pirellis rather than the faster Softs when it was crunch time in P2.

Ferrari showed that they too made significant improvements in the offseason, especially in the power department, if not quite lifting them to the level of the top two teams. Charles Leclerc drove the wheels of his SF21 to set the fourth fastest time, only about a tenth behind Bottas. New Scuderia teammate Carlos Sainz, who made the jump to Maranello from McLaren, was quite a bit off that pace after looking very close to Leclerc up until that point and could only manage a P8 starting position. Pierre Gasly was the lone AlphaTauri to make it into the top ten but again looked very sharp after his breakout year in 2020. The young Frenchman appears to be maturing and improving every season and he tucked in right behind Leclerc with a solid P5 time. Daniel Ricciardo outpaced his teammate Lando Norris in his debut for McLaren, P6 to P7, while two-time champion Fernando Alonso impressed on his return to F1 after a hiatus dating to 2018 by setting a very respectable P9 time for newly badged Alpine (formerly Renault). And Lance Stroll got through to Q3 and will start P10 for the renamed Aston Martin team (formerly Racing Point and still powered by Mercedes engines), while his new teammate, former Ferrari man Sebastian Vettel, saw his bad luck from 2020 carry over when he had to slow for yellow flags at critical moment in Q1 and could not make it out of that session. The German four-time champion will start from a lowly P18 and will have to control his emotions and make steady progress if he is to avoid a repeat of the last few years’ many mental errors. At the very least, the British Racing Green-clad livery is beautiful to look at even if team Aston Martin will have a hard time replicating last season’s success as a “mini Mercedes” under the new restrictive downforce rules.

Top 10 qualifiers for the Bahrain GP:

Complete qualifying results available via Formula1.com.

Tomorrow’s race airs live beginning at 10:55 AM Eastern on ESPN2 here in the States. Time to find out if Verstappen has what it takes in race trim to bring the fight to mighty Mercedes. Hope to see you then!