While Flavio Briatore praised the simulator work that Franco Colapinto had done to the distance to collaborate with the tuning of the Pierre Gasly car before the classification of the Bahrain Grand Prix, Jack Doohan, the owner of the armchair to which the Argentine hopes to climb at some point, had a bittersweet Sunday in the Sakhir circuit. The Australian played a good role in the beginning of the test, in which he showed some good maneuvers and became ninth. He ended up crossing the goal in 13th place, but at the close of the day he received a new penalty, which relegated it to the 15th position of the classification. After 11 °, Doohan showed a good rhythm and was even fighting positions with two titans of the category. For several laps, when he marched ninth, he was stalking Max Verstappen, who had a day for oblivion, and defended himself in addition to Lewis Hamilton’s attacks. And when some turns were still missing to reach the middle of the race, Alpine celebrated having her two pilots in the dot zone (Gasly was fifth and the oceanic, tenth). “I don’t think hard tires have been strong to be honest. They also saw Max in that second stunt with the hard tire. To be honest, if I had a little more speed on the line, it would have passed it, because he was having many problems with that hard tire,” Doohan said after the race on that fight with the current champion. Yuki Tsunoda and Carlos Sainz, who left the track full of remains of carbon fiber from the Williams of the Spanish, who retired with the right pontón shattered. And he endured that place for a long time, but when eight laps were missing for the end, he was already out of the points zone and ended up losing two positions with respect to the start. Encima, shortly after the end of the race came the news that he had received a penalty of five seconds for having exceeded the limits of the track – an infraction for which many pilots were noticed, until the Verstappen himself – and descended two more positions. Doohan is one of the four pilots who still failed to add points in the season, along with Fernando Alonso, Liam Lawson and Gabriel Bortoleto. The Australian adds an abandonment in Australia, a 13th place in China and two 15 °, that of Japan and that of Bahrain. In Shanghai, he also suffered two strong sanctions. First he made a rude mistake in the last turn of the Sprint and Chocó Bortoleto, so the FIA recharged him with 10 seconds and took two points of the superliccence. And in the main race, he added another ten seconds of penalty for his defensive driving against Isack Hadjar and later, the commissioners took another two points of his license.
