Sainz's second morning schedule was due to a loose gutter cover on the field, and the 2024 F1 pre-season test, which was terminated early by a red flag, ran the fastest time in the field on the second day, with a lap time 0 ahead of Pérez, who was driving a Red Bull car758 seconds, but he was on softer C4 tyres.
With about 1 hour and 38 minutes left in the first half of the four-hour journey the next day, a ditch cover was found to have fallen off at the 11th turn near the Bahrain International Circuit, and Hamilton of Mercedes and Leclerc of Ferrari were pressed one after another, the latter of which had a badly damaged floor and had to be replaced, so the trip was terminated early and was not resumed to inspect the venue.
Prior to that, Leclerc was the fastest driver in the morning, almost 0At six seconds, Williams Sargent was third, while some braking problems left him in the pits for a long time, with Pérez in fourth place with only 20 laps in the end, and Aston Martin's Alonso in fifth, with only slightly more laps than Pérez.
In order to make up for the lost time in the morning, the afternoon trip was increased by an hour, so some teams changed their schedules, such as Verstappen to replace Pérez's Red Bull Racing in the afternoon, and decided that the Mexican driver would be in charge of the full day's testing.
After taking over the SF-24 in the afternoon, Sainz immediately set a lap time that was not inferior to his teammate in the initial timing, but about two hours after the start of the stage, he set a time half a second faster than his teammate to temporarily take the lead.
Although he was overtaken by Norris for a while, he went on to easily overpower the McLaren driver on Pirelli's softer C4-spec tyres to finish with one point 29The fastest time of 921 seconds was the first in the second day of the test and the first driver to break 1 minute and 30 seconds since the start of the test, while the two Ferrari drivers accumulated a total of 138 laps for the team, the most of any car.
The Red Bull Racing team didn't go so well in the afternoon, as Pérez lost momentum and slowed down after a long run, but was able to pit on his own. However, Pérez managed to complete a good 129 laps and finish the race to second place with a better lap than yesterday's fastest team-mate.
In contrast to the previous day's low profile, the Mercedes team went out on the second day and Hamilton took second place on the table ahead of Norris before being overtaken by Pérez in the final hour. Ricciardo, on the other hand, helped Red Bull Racing to occupy fifth place with softer C4 tyres.
Leclerc, who was fastest in the morning, ended up in sixth, ahead of Stroll and Alpine's Ocon, and Sauber's Bottas and Piastri, whose fastest lap was made in the morning, in first place.
IX, 10. Apart from Sergio Pérez and Hamilton, Williams' Sargent was another driver to finish the second day on his own, completing 117 laps and finishing 11th in best lap. Alonso, Zhou Guanyu and Gasly all completed less than 40 laps in the shortened morning schedule, and the lap times were not ideal.
Haas' Magnussen and Hulkenberg are still close to the bottom, while the slowest in the field was Red Bulls' Yuki Tsunoda, who was also a victim of the forced shortening of the morning's schedule.