Russell posts only sub-1:34 as Mercedes probes W17 pace

Mercedes used the Bahrain pre-season test to probe the W17’s pace and tire behavior, finishing with George Russell posting the fastest lap of the week — a 1:33.918 on the soft C3 tire — while Lewis Hamilton sat second in the morning order. Russell completed 78 laps in the final morning and handed the car to Kimi Antonelli for afternoon running; the quick one-lap pace, including the only sub-1:34 lap of the session, contrasted with the longer-run work Mercedes prioritized during the test.

That long-run work included a 58-lap full race simulation by Russell that provided the clearest look at the W17’s tire degradation. On the soft C3s Russell’s first representative lap in the race run was 1:40.4, but lap times drifted into the 1:42s by lap 15 with an in-lap of 1:43.5 on lap 18 — roughly a two-second drop across that stint. The medium C2 stint began with a 1:38.6 and produced consistent 1:39.0–1:39.9 laps for more than a dozen laps, showing only about a 1.3-second drop over that window. The hard C1s produced an opening 1:38.2 and then hovered between 1:39 and 1:40 with the flattest degradation of the day, leading Mercedes to judge the medium and hard compounds more promising for race distance than the softs.

Mercedes also used the test to recover and collect mileage after earlier reliability and setup issues; the team logged heavy running across the week and the morning programs suggested greater stability and consistency after initial problems. Russell had warned after the opening day that “there’s work for us to do to get the W17 into a happier place,” and the session’s combination of short-run speed and detailed long-run tire data will form the basis of further setup changes and updates ahead of the next test phase.