The race is on, and Pierre Ghazley topped the first day of the final pre-season test in Bahrain for Alphiaree,

but it was Mercedes that captured the headlines by revealing its aggressively tightly packaged new sidepods.

But how well did those Mercedes changes work and have we learned anything new about the

relative performance of the cars?

I'm Ed Straw and joining me to answer that question and many more is Scott Mitchell.

Well Scott, hello, simple summary of the day, Pierre Ghazdi will be world champion.

Yeah, exactly.

Very, very good year in store for Alpha Tauri.

He's obviously learned a lot since his Red Bull Demotion.

He came of age as a Grand Prix winner in 2020.

He had his career best season in 2021,

and now he is ready to go out all guns blazing in the 2022 season

and sweep his way to the title. And to put a little bit of sense checking on that, he set his time on the C-5s. I think that tire compound adjusted, the Ferraris were quicker. But still a decent day for Alphitari. They seemed to spend quite a lot of time fettling the setup. but when they eventually got it right, it seemed to

work okay. But they did have some difficulties with porpoising, didn't they? Yeah, they did. I think the

runs we saw, I watched, I watched Gasley sort of make his way up into top spot. I saw a couple of

his laps on board and then sort of obviously some of the external cameras and

car looked neat and tidy um maybe a little bit like maybe looked like it was not quite as sharp as

it needed to be um on corner entry and especially in the final sector that might well but that might

well be the softest compound

tyres, obviously, dying a death by the end of the lap. And the cars are quite understery as well.

Yeah, exactly. But you're right, the porpoisin was absolutely an issue. There's an amazing

driver-facing onboard camera shot of Pierre's head going for a properly wild ride.

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