F1 Paddock Notebook – Bahrain Grand Prix Saturday

Crash.net brings you its daily round-up of all the news, updates and added gossip from the paddock after Saturday’s action briefings at of the Bahrain Grand Prix.

- Charles Leclerc becomes the second-youngest F1 pole-sitter (21 years, 166 days), only behind his teammate Sebastian Vettel who took his maiden pole at the 2008 Italian Grand Prix 94 days younger.

- The Monegasque became the first driver from his country to claim an F1 pole position.

- He also become the 99^th different pole-sitter in F1 history at its 999^th race.

- Leclerc’s pole also shifts the total pole tally back in the favour of the rest of the F1 grid against Lewis Hamilton. The British driver claimed his 84^th career pole two weeks ago in Australia but Leclerc’s pole means the rest of the grid combined now has 85 poles.

- Romain Grosjean will serve a three-place grid penalty for impeding Lando Norris during Q1 or qualifying meaning he will start from 11^th place. The Haas driver also picked up one penalty point for the incident.

- Grosjean explained he had no team radio message warning about Norris and he couldn’t see him coming at the final corner while he says he almost crashed trying to move out of the way.

- Norris believes Vettel inadvertently triggered his qualifying incident with Grosjean after overtaking the French driver before starting his fast lap, forcing him to back off and into Norris’s path.

- Daniil Kvyat was forced to abort his second run in Q2 after a used set of soft tyres were put on his Toro Rosso by his team.

- Rokit has launched its own energy drink ‘ROK’ which was available from Williams in the Bahrain paddock.