Stake F1 Team KICK Sauber officially headed into a new season, as Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu completed the first two practice sessions of the campaign-opening Bahrain Grand Prix.

Practice 1 was run under the Sakhir sun, but with a stiff, unsettling breeze that contributed to low temperatures; in FP2, however, the floodlights made the C44 sparkle in its new black and Fluo Racing Green livery, in conditions that will be more representative of what will face our drivers in qualifying and the race.

Valtteri Bottas: "It was good to finally get the season underway with the first practice sessions of the year and get some more mileage in. I reckon we learned a lot since testing last week, working around and discovering more about the setup of our car: still, there is some extra work that needs to be done, especially on the single-lap performance. This'll be our main task overnight and during the final practice session tomorrow morning. It seems we are still quite close to our main competitors, and it'll likely come down to a handful of tenths in Qualifying tomorrow."

Zhou Guanyu: "It was good to be back on track in an official session. Today's conditions were quite different from what we experienced during testing, which made it fairly interesting: we had some issues in the morning, but our afternoon went quite smoothly, and we were able to tick all our boxes. Now, our focus is on getting everything ready ahead of tomorrow's qualifying: it's difficult to evaluate the true pecking order, as FP2 didn't show the true potential of our performance and, similarly, we don't know what everyone else was doing. It's a very close midfield, once again, and we might have a tight qualifying session."

Check out our Thursday gallery from Bahrain here.