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With the F1 prologue is complete, team will spend the days leading up to next week’s Bahrain Grand Prix painstakingly analysing gigabytes of data in pursuit of every last millisecond of performance.
That leaves us to consider what we learnt from what we could see from the outside during three days of testing.
But looking at the raw timing data after testing is bound to give you a misleading impression of the competitive order.
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No two teams run identical programs. Unlike in qualifying for a grand prix, there’s no incentive for any team to give a car its minimal fuel load and best engine mode. The purpose of testing is just to collect, not top the timing tower. There are no points for first place here.
Consider the raw three-day times collected at the conclusion of testing.
Times by team — raw data
1. Ferrari (Carlos Sainz): 1m 29.921s (C4 tyre)*^
2. Mercedes (George Russell): +0.447s (C4 tyre)
3. Sauber (Zhou Guanyu): +0.726s (C4 tyre)
4. Red Bull Racing (Sergio Perez): +0.758s (C3 tyre)*
5. RB (Yuki Tsunoda): +0.854s (C4 tyre)
6. Williams (Alex Albon): +1.063s (C4 tyre)
7. McLaren (Oscar Piastri): +1.109s (C3 tyre)
8. Aston Martin (Fernando Alonso): +1.238s (C3 tyre)
9. Haas (Nico Hülkenberg): +1.765s (C3 tyre)^
10. Alpine (Esteban Ocon): +2.140s (C3 tyre)*
*Best time set on day 2.
^Best time set in the afternoon.
There are some clear discrepancies in the data that makes a direct comparison difficult.
Let’s start with the tyres. Half the top 10 used the faster C4 tyre for their best lap, while the rest used the slower C3.
Max Verstappen’s best time — not shown above as it was slower than Sergio Pérez’s fastest lap — also came on his second flying lap rather than his first, limiting his potential.
There are some filters we can run the data through to try to clear the picture a little.
Data from F1 suggests the C4 tyre is around 0.52 seconds faster than the C3. We can start by subtracting that from all the C4 runners.
We can also try to give Verstappen back his first lap on his C3 tyres too. The degradation rate is estimated to be 0.16 seconds per lap.
Times by team — corrected for tyres
1. Ferrari (Carlos Sainz): 1m 30.441s*^
2. Red Bull Racing (Max Verstappen): +0.154s^
3. Mercedes (George Russell): +0.154s
4. McLaren (Oscar Piastri): +0.589s
5. Aston Martin (Fernando Alonso): +0.718s^
6. Sauber (Zhou Guanyu): +0.726s
7. RB (Yuki Tsunoda): +0.854s
8. Williams (Alex Albon): +1.063s
9. Haas (Nico Hülkenberg): +1.245s^
10. Alpine (Esteban Ocon): +1.620s*
*Best time set on day 2.
^Best time set in the afternoon.
Suddenly we have a time sheet that looks a little closer to what we might have expected.
There are still some really important caveats, though.
First, not every team set its best time on the same day.
Carlos Sainz’s fastest time was set on Thursday, the second day of the test. Most other teams set their best laps on Friday.
Why does that matter?
Sainz’s lap appears to be an outlier. The grid barely got within 0.4 seconds of it on Friday. It could suggest that either the track was slower on the final day or Ferrari was pushing unusually hard on Thursday. It could even suggest a combination of both.
Additionally confounding is that Sainz’s lap came in the midafternoon, in the 4pm hour. The track gets faster as day turns to night, which is why most of the rest of the best times came after 6pm.
Trying to calculate for these more nebulous differences is more difficult.
And then we have all the standard testing asterisks, like fuel loads and engine modes. Plus, because cars are being constantly fettled during testing, sometimes you get a clearer picture by adding together fastest sector times to account for set-up changes.
Not all that data is publicly available, but F1 has attempted a corrected order. We’ve applied the F1-estimated data to our theoretical tyre-corrected times.
Times by team — F1 estimate
1. Red Bull Racing: 1m 30.595s
2. Ferrari: +0.226s
3. McLaren: +0.380s
4. Mercedes: +0.571s
5. RB: +0.734s
6. Aston Martin: +0.852s
7. Alpine: +1.042s
8. Sauber: +1.051s
9. Williams: +1.123s
10. Haas: +1.323s
That end result is quite dramatically different from the combined three-day time sheet we ended up with after Friday, neatly illustrating why you can’t just trust the times after testing.
And the above order, despite being based on F1 telemetry, isn’t certain. All the collected data will be analysed back at the factory and converted into new car configurations for next week’s grand prix.
Upgrades mean that the 10 cars in action in testing effectively won’t appear again this season.
Plus Bahrain is just one particular track in a record-long 24-race calendar.
What about race pace? F1 has also collected estimated long-run performance over three days. The below gaps assume a 90-minute grand prix.
Race pace by team — F1 estimate
1. Red Bull Racing
2. Mercedes: +0.22 per cent (+12s)
3. Ferrari: +0.25 per cent (+14s)
4. McLaren: +0.47 per cent (+25s)
5. Aston Martin: +0.69 per cent (+37s)
6. RB: +0.81 per cent (+44s)
7. Sauber: +1.20 per cent (+65s)
8. Alpine: +1.21 per cent (+65s)
9. Williams: +1.25 per cent (+68s)
10. Haas: +1.49 per cent (+80s)
SO WHAT DO WE KNOW?
A rough sense of the order is all you can really count on from testing, so at this point we can try to break the field down into several approximate groups.
The leader
Red Bull Racing
Despite Ferrari’s surge over the last two days of the test, no-one was really persuaded against believing Red Bull Racing is anything other than the championship favourite.
The team had too much of a head start thanks to last year’s dominance to be anything other than the leader, even if the ultimate margin remains in doubt.
On track the car looked assured. Off track the team seemed confident. All signs point to the obvious.
“Today we made a plan not to focus on pure lap time,” Verstappen said of his final day in the car. “I think it was more important to get the long running done and get a bit more of an understanding of the car.
“To be honest I think it all looks quite positive. I’m quite happy with the car, how it was behaving.”
Though Verstappen wouldn’t be drawn on where he expects the RB20 to be in the pecking order, Fernando Alonso was blunt after watching three days of testing.
“I think 19 drivers in the paddock now will think they will not win the championship,” he said.
“It happens 99 per cent of the time in your career. This is a brutal sport.”
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The challenger?
Ferrari
Ferrari remains a genuine wildcard. Its last two days of testing were impressive, the car looked well balanced around the track and set-up seemed to come easy to the team.
Despite the caveats on Sainz’s time, the SF-24 is still clearly rapid over a single lap, and the Spaniard’s race simulation on Thursday was also impressive — though a Verstappen simulation on Friday put it in a less electrifying context.
Most important is that the team believes is has dialled out the worst of its poor handling characteristics this year. Take those out and suddenly the gap to Red Bull Racing might appear closeable.
“The most important and the most interesting thing for us is the feeling from Carlos and Charles,” team principal Fred Vasseur said. “They are much more comfortable in the car.
“The car looks much more consistent, a bit easier to drive also, and this is a good step forward.
“The degradation that we had [on Thursday] for the long stint was on another planet compared to last year.
“But now it’s not just a matter of being consistent, it’s a matter of being fast.”
Ferrari still has to prove that it’s within striking distance of Red Bull Racing — and then, if it is, prove that it can make the most of its chances.
But there’s genuine hope after testing that Ferrari might be on the right path.
The other frontrunners
McLaren, Mercedes
McLaren had a somewhat trouble test, with reliability gremlins restricting running. The team completed almost 500 fewer kilometres than Ferrari over three days.
The problems weren’t severe, however, and testing is the time to uncover any glitches before the competitive action starts. In any case, the team is substantially better prepared than it has been after previous years.
McLaren is also more optimistic about its place in the order than the times suggest. Team principal Andrea Stella said that the MCL80 has carried over weaknesses in slow-speed corners, and with Bahrain being a very traction-dependent circuit, the car was made to look a little worse that it would be over the course of the full year.
Sector times bear this out, with the car a much closer match with the RB20 through the faster corners and down the straights.
Mercedes rose late to argue it belongs among the frontrunners. Technical director James Allison said testing has verified that the all-new design has eliminated the difficult handling characteristics of the last two seasons, giving the drivers more confidence.
But both Lewis Hamilton and George Russell were cautious not to get ahead of themselves.
“We’ve got a great platform to build on,” Hamilton said, but he added: “We know we’ve got work to do and we’re not yet where we want to be. We knew that would be the case coming into the test though.”
Being on the right path would be a massive improvement for Mercedes all the same. A strong development program from a firm base could then bridge the gap.
The midfield
Aston Martin, RB, Alpine, Williams, Sauber
Now things are getting harder to read.
Aston Martin looked relatively unimpressive on single-lap pace, but the AMR24’s stronger race simulation suggests there’s more performance in this car than the times would suggest. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the green team back among the frontrunners this season, though it seems like too big a stretch for it to relive its giant-killing podium-winning performances from this time last year.
RB could be the disrupter of 2024. It has looked solidly in the midfield on both long and short runs throughout the test, representing a marked step forward on last year.
There’s been a lot of hype around the newly rebranded Italian team — not all of it good given the politics of the team’s ownership — but there’s optimism it can return to regular points contention from the beginning of the season.
“Q3, points — that has to be our target,” Daniel Ricciardo said. “Obviously that puts us front of the midfield. If we’re not there next week, we certainly want to be there soon.”
Alpine tends not to show its hand in testing, and matters are made more obscure by the fact this is an all-new car. The team is happy with the way its three days ran and is confident about the amount of data it collected. Its relatively unimpressive showing here could just be a matter of adjusting to the new car before its potential is unleashed in later rounds.
Williams suffered from a slow and unreliable start to testing, and though things picked up as days progressed, Alex Albon seemed unconvinced by the amount of progress made, particularly on set-up — though added that he though he has “a decent car to go racing with”.
Paddock consensus suggested Sauber’s rocket up the time sheet on Friday was a proper glory run on low fuel, distorting its place in the order. All other metrics have the C44 among the bottom three.
Backmarkers
Haas
On every interpreted metric Haas ended the testing at the bottom of the pile as the slowest car, something the team predicted ahead of the pre-season.
This isn’t a write-off, however. Team principal Ayao Komatsu has been consistent that testing has been about gathering deep data, and its 441 laps — the most of any team — suggests Haas has a lot of information to sift through.
If it can solve the car’s severe tyre woes, that will represent an immediate step forward on last year. From there it can start pumping in developments with optimism they’ll stick.
The team will almost certainly start last, but it felt like the team at least satisfied its objectives during the week.
Distance by team
1. Haas: 441 laps (2386.69 km)
2. Ferrari: 416 laps (2251.39 km)
3. Red Bull Racing: 391 laps (2116.09 km)
4. Aston Martin: 379 laps (2051.15 km)
5. Sauber: 379 laps (2051.15 km)
6. RB: 367 laps (1986.20 km)
7. Mercedes: 361 laps (1953.73 km)
8. Alpine: 334 laps (1807.61 km)
9. McLaren: 328 laps (1775.14 km)
10. Williams: 299 laps (1618.19 km)
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