Final sessions at Bahrain raises reliability questions

Who has the upper hand seemed fairly clear after the second session. It was looking very good for the Mercedes-powered teams with Ferrari-driven cars close on the Silver Arrows’ heels.

The last session produced some interesting results and some serious cause for concern.

The Mercedes-powered Williams of Filipe Massa and Valtteri Bottas put in a lot of laps until an engine failure, referred to as an ICE failure.

If you are not sure what that is, it refers to an Internal Combustion Engine failure, rather than the demise of one of the electric drive systems.

That breakdown occurredafter 108 laps when Bottas came to a stop, McLaren then stated that they had suffered a similar fate after just 21 laps. That is apart from the gearbox failure suffered by Lewis Hamilton.

At long last the Red Bull team managed to put in multiple laps with the reigning world champion behind the wheel.

Sebastien Vettel had a very difficult start when he stopped early on his first lap and then did not even make it out of the pits on the second attempt. When Vettel finally hit the track he was to spin at turn one, believed to be the result of brake problems.

Putting in more laps proved that Red Bull had at last found some reliability, as shown previously by Daniel Ricciardo.

Unfortunately, the pace was a problem, being more than four seconds off the front runner’s times.

Not a great situation with just two weeks to the Australian season opener and no opportunity for further testing.

It appears that it will not be pace that is going to be the priority for the first two or three races.

It would appear to be all about reliability.

So who will be first across the line? Your guess is good as mine.

It was inevitable that it would come to an end and that is exactly what happened to the Formula One Teams Association (FOTA).

Formed six years ago, FOTA was established to provide a single body for the teams in any negotiations and dealings with Bernie Ecclestone and the FIA. All seemed to be well until a dispute over the resource restriction agreement (RRA) resulted in the withdrawal, in 2011, of Red Bull Racing and Ferrari, followed by Torro Rosso and Sauber.

Last week, secretary general of the association Oliver Weingarten said. “FOTA has been disbanded as a result of insufficient funds to continue and a lack of consensus among all the teams on a non-contentious mandate.”

The financial situation was compounded when some teams refused to pay last year’s membership fees. A sad situation, but just one of many troubling the world of F1.