Carlos Sainz leads resurgent Ferrari's charge as Spaniard tops Friday's day 2 of pre-season testing

Ferrari had yet another good session of testing as Carlos Sainz ended the first half of the second day with the fastest lap in the entire session.

After the start of the 2023 pre-season testing at the Bahrain International Circuit, teams have been running their cars rigorously to collect enough data to make sure that there is nothing to worry about with their cars. While this has given a lot of insight, the teams at the top in the past two days have been Red Bull and Ferrari.

Carlos Sainz, who had the second fastest lap behind Max Verstappen yesterday (February 23), was able to rip off around 5-tenths of the same laptime to become the fastest driver on the second day of testing.

Though this looks promising for Ferrari and Carlos Sainz himself, it must be understood that the laptimes set during pre-season testing do not reflect the accurate performance capabilities of the cars.

Pre-season testing is held for teams to drive their new challengers for the first time whilst collecting data. This helps them to understand the cars better and plan their development strategies for the upcoming season. Hence, almost all of the drivers 'sandbag' (deliberately underperform) during the entire session.

This is quite apparent from the fact that Carlos Sainz's fastest lap at 1:32.486 is almost 2 seconds slower than the pole lap on the same circuit in 2022, which was set by his teammate, Charles Leclerc.

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Carlos Sainz satisfied with the performance of the car during the testing sessions

Carlos Sainz, while talking about the performance of the car after the first day of testing, revealed that the car had felt promising with the data it had provided. He added that the reliability of the car felt good, something which is of peak importance to Ferrari after the reliability issues the team faced last season. He said:

"Overall a positive first day. Reliability was good and we could run smoothly, covering the whole run plan and gathering valuable data, which is encouraging. We progressed well with the setup during the day."

This gives a positive idea about the performance of the SF-23. It also helped the Spaniard put in the fastest lap of the morning session during the second day of testing.

At the same time, however, Max Verstappen has had promising results with Red Bull too. Overall, the 2023 F1 season could turn out to be pretty much interesting after what happened in the past season.