With pre-season testing completed, attention soon turned to the first race of the 2023 Formula 1 season at the Bahrain International Circuit on Sunday. And while many F1 fans may have looked at the start of a new season as reason enough to be hopeful of a close championship fight, there was a depressingly familiar look to proceedings once the race settled down. Ferrari struggled with reliability, Mercedes were short on outright pace, and there was a typically dominant performance from Red Bull, who locked out the front row and then completed a comfortable 1-2 finish in the race, with Max Verstappen leading home Sergio Perez. But will Red Bull's pre-eminence in the desert set the tone for the rest of the season, or do the unique characteristics of the Bahrain International Circuit make this result an outlier? Joining Michael Butterworth to pick over the bones of the season's first race is Dieter Rencken, Editorial Director of RacingNews365.com . Fernando Alonso finished an impressive third for Aston Martin, but where do his new team stack up against the rest this year? With McLaren suffering with poor pace and reliability, what will it take to return the papaya squad to the sharp end of the grid? And what sort of an account did F1's three rookies give of themselves in Bahrain? All this and more, on this edition of the RacingNews365.com F1 podcast!
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