Formula 1, Bahrain GP: Kimi Raikkonen tops 3rd practice, Lewis Hamilton 4th

Vettel snatched an opportunistic win from Hamilton in Formula One’s season opener in Australia two weeks ago, taking advantage of a timely virtual safety auto to pit and stay ahead of the Briton who had led from pole.

Vettel steals Kimi’s limelight: Kimi Raikkonen had looked like the quicker Ferrari driver all weekend, but when it mattered – in the final seconds of Q3 – Sebastian Vettel pulled a lap right out of the top drawer to claim his first pole position of the year.

Vettel was fourth while Hamilton fifth. “These painful moments are the real learning experiences”, Mercedes motorsport chief Toto Wolff said. It looked like we were a bit quicker than the rest but it depends a bit on the programme.

“It hurt to leave all those points on the table, especially because we know we had the pace to win in Australia”. Despite the mistake he went on to set a time that was just 0.090s off teammate Hamilton, suggesting the Mercedes simply isn’t as fast as expected this weekend.

“We have some homework to do”.

“It’s fine as long as we joke with each other and I think even if we are very different persons, I think we share – all of us – a common passion and that makes us quite equal again”.

“We certainly believe we have more performance to extract from the auto and that’s what the team are working on at the moment”.

Hamilton said the incident showed “it won’t be easy” to win another title but he doesn’t expect the true strength of the cars to be revealed until later in the season.

Raikkonen and Vettel were up front as cooler temperatures and nightfall on Friday matched the conditions for Sunday evening’s race.

Vettel won the season-opening race in Australia last month and gave himself a great opportunity to secure back-to-back victories at the Sakhir track.

The surprise of the opening day was the performance of the Haas team to challenge for the fourth-fastest team on the back of two strong showings from Romain Grosjean.

Valtteri Bottas was sixth fastest in the second Mercedes, nearly one second adrift of Raikkonen while Nico Hulkenberg fronted the midfield in seventh, ahead of Carlos Sainz Jr who was eighth in the second Renault.

Haas, that turned heads with their rate in the Australian season opener, might not quite repeat their fantasy be a effect of Melbourne with Magnussen’s group mate Romain Grosjean failing to create it past the opening 18 minutes of qualifying.

McLaren dropped Honda engines at the end of a year ago – at a net cost of about $100m – claiming their lack of performance and reliability was holding back a vehicle they said was one of the best in the field.