Ferrari is back in front of the grid. Charles Leclerc drove his SF2021 into fourth place, setting the new season off to a good start and beating his new teammate Carlos Sainz, who scored an eight place. The situation for the Italian team looks much better than it did in the last Bahrain qualification sessions at the full circuit, in which both Ferrari didn't manage to get into Q3.

Leclerc is satisfied with his new challenger:"As I already said on Friday, we weren't expecting to be this much competitive, but we should stay grounded because here the race is always strange and we have to wait. But at the moment it looks like we've done a huge step forward ."

However, he isn't fully impressed with his driving performance: "Overall, I can't say I've driven at my best because I was suffering the loss of stability of the car. But I knew I had it in myself to do well in the qualification session, I realised yesterday we have a good pace, but you can't know it for sure until you're on the track."

"I had a good feeling since the beginning of the session, and slowly we got to Q3, in which I did a good lap despite the wind. I made the difference in the first sector, in the other two i suffered a bit, but managed to stay more or less on the same times and at the end I'm very satisfied with my performance," said Leclerc regarding the Q3 session.

He's cautiously hopeful for tomorrow's race: "The race pace isn't bad, but it'll be a long race. In my opinion, the podium will be extremely hard to reach, but to keep the fourth place would already be an huge result."

Leclerc thinks his main rival for the position will be Gasly with his Alpha Tauri:"I expect the AlphaTauri to perform well during the race, yesterday I was really surprised by them and, in addition to that, Gasly will start with C3. For this reason I say that the goal is to keep the position."

P4. I enjoyed that 👊 pic.twitter.com/ShzVtCJC3g

— Charles Leclerc (@Charles_Leclerc) March 27, 2021