Bahrain Grand Prix

The 2023 Bahrain Grand Prix once again opened the season. Max Verstappen lined up on pole continuing where he left off from 2022. The defending world champion easily took the win ahead of teammate Sergio Perez who finished 11s behind him. Meanwhile there was an amazing fight for the final place on the podium. Fernando Alonso took Aston Martin's second podium in Formula 1, their first since Azerbaijan 2021. The spaniard fought his way from 5th on the grid having a tense fight with former teammate Lewis Hamilton.

He pulled off a beautiful move on the 7 time world champion in the tricky downhill left hander of turn 10. Alonso had soon left Hamilton for dust and was catching fellow countryman Carlos Sainz. The two diced over 3rd place but in the end it was the veteran 41 year Alonso who finshed ahead as Sainz had no grip on a old set of hard tyres. Alonso's podium signaled to the paddock that Aston Martin are very strong team to be feared with. The British team proving that they are already quicker than Mercedes and are arguably just as quick as the Ferrari's.

The Italian team's season however could not have started off worse for Charles Leclerc. Already faced with power unit issues on the morning of the Bahrain Grand Prix, Leclerc was forced to already put a new energy store in his engine pool. Just as things looked to be tough things got even more painful as the Monogasque was forced to pull over mid-race with a failure which turned out to be his energy store once again. Charles Leclerc was hoping to avoid a repeating of reliability issues as his 2022 season was plagued with them but now just one race into 2023 he knows that he will already be taking a engine penalty at some point in the future and puts him 25 points off of Verstappen.