Bahrain GP in Malaysia 2026simulated 400 times

Opinion · our reading

Verstappen starts on pole and wins only one race in four, and Hadjar misses the podium in the same car

The starting column is the GRID, and it already includes three penalties applied to the qualifying order. Isack Hadjar qualified third and starts eighth for his seventh internal combustion engine. Franco Colapinto qualified fifteenth and starts twenty-first: he carried five places over from Baku, where he caused the crash with Gasly and Norris, and adds ten for a fifth engine. Arvid Lindblad, with a new engine, turbo and exhaust, starts last. Hamilton and Stroll were called by the stewards, but both got away with a warning and keep their places.

Max Verstappen has pole and the model gives him a 23.5% chance of winning: he is the favourite, yet wins fewer than one race in four. Sepang is one of the circuits where starting position counts least in our engine (third among those measured, behind Las Vegas and Paul Ricard), the exact opposite of Baku last week. That is why Kimi Antonelli, starting third, gets 18.5% and finishes ahead of Lewis Hamilton, who starts second on 16.5%: what matters here is race pace, not grid slot.

All the wins go to the top seven: no one else wins a single time in 400 races. The odd case is Isack Hadjar, who has the same car as the pole-sitter and never wins, with a podium in just 0.3% of races. This is where we think the model may be wrong: it sees much less pace in him than in his team-mate, and starting eighth in a Red Bull that is quick here, a podium would be less unusual than the table suggests. Further back, Lindblad and Colapinto, starting at the back, finish around sixteenth on average.