Here we are, having gone through F1's "Official Pre-Season Test" in the desert, a week before the real thing. Some teams had a good three days, and some didn't. Let's find out who's who...
All images from teams' respective social media, unless specified
Summary
No shakedowns here, mate. Only Official Testing from here on out. Well, after three days in the desert, we saw a few spins and mechanical failures, some fast times and some very very bouncy racecars. Many teams brought new parts and pieces, with varying levels of immediate effectiveness (as will be discussed below) and others just focused on revising what they brought to Spain a few weeks back. With one week to go, some are sitting pretty and others will be burning the midnight oil from now until Sunday.
This is not a pecking order prediction. That will come later this week...
Top of the Class
Red Bull: A
Last year's runner up team has more or less gone under the radar here in testing. Red Bull have a car that is at least visually striking, with design maestro Adrian Newey always delivering an interesting car, and one that is usually fast. The car has always been in the middle to upper end of the timesheets (not that that matters too much, but you'd rather be up at the top then at the bottom), although watching the test it has looked a little bit lazy and unresponsive.
That all changed on the final day of testing, though. A late start after the team had to fit a plethora of new aerodynamic parts, the car came out of the box and looked transformed. Although not as crazy as Mercedes' changes, the car seemed to be a refined version of its previous guise. On the very first lap, Sergio Perez took the car out of the pits and straight to the top of the timesheets for the morning session on the final day, not even bothering with a precautionary stop in the pits to check if things are OK. That's confidence. Later in the evening, Verstappen went quickest of all and looked like the car was in a class of one on track. Warning shots fired.
Ferrari: A
Ferrari have the most laps across the two tests, which will be a welcome relief to the team in Maranello. The car has looked more or less at the front of the field since its first day in Barcelona, although it should be noted that the team did not bring any major changes tot he car for this test, unlike Red Bull and Mercedes. It's hard to find anything negative to say about the car, it looks great both dynamically and aesthetically, and seems to be fast. The team said they didn't have a single reliability problem across all six days of pre-season testing, which is always good.
The Ferrari hype train was derailed slightly by Verstappen's late run of fast laps, but the team didn't seem to be too concerned with outright performance. If they can keep up their reliability record and stay within reach of Red Bull, you would expect at least a couple of wins coming their way this year, especially as the first handful of races may be ones of attrition.
Aston Martin: A-
I think if Aston Martin did not even turn up to testing, nobody would have noticed. There was a single reliability problem with the car throughout the three days, which is not too bad, and the car seems OK watching it. The team is not really known for chasing any kind of performance or qualifying-type laps across previous years, and this year was more of the same. Primarily focused on long runs, the car threw up some pleasant surprises in terms of pace, with Vettel in particular showing some promise.
The team isn't really sure where they stand, and it would seem like that is by intent, rather than by accident. Anonymous testing is generally better than the alternative, and I'm not sure how you can get more anonymous than Aston Martin was over the last week.
Mercedes: A-
Mercedes is a team known for breaking records, and they certainly sounded like a broken record this time around. Most laps of anybody across the three days in Bahrain (although Ferrari had more across the two tests combined). Check. Radical update after the first test. Check. Not the fastest car. Check. "Red Bull and Ferrari are ahead of us, we aren't going to be competing for the win." Check. We know how this story ends, as a nice little rhyme tells us:
Ferrari are Red
Alpine are Blue
"Red Bull are Faster"
Mercedes 1-2...
Will this year be any different? Maybe not by the time we get to Abu Dhabi in eight months, but for the first couple of races? It's plausible. The car looked nothing short of a mess on track, bouncing up and down like a basketball at high speed and sliding all over the place at low speed. The team took a different approach to the sidepods (as you can see above) compared to other teams, with rumors of laptime gain in the 1-second region. As we saw with Red Bull, it is possible to bolt on new parts and immediately see the benefit. This did not happen for the Silver Arrows, but only an idiot would truly believe that they won't be winning races in the very near future.
Passing Grade
AlphaTauri: B
AlphaTauri are in the Aston Martin camp of not really having anything notable happen to them across the three days of testing in Bahrain. Also like Aston Martin, the car looks like it is exactly average, not too fast, not too slow, lacking grip in general but no major alarm bells. The team really only ends up below Aston because if the past tells us anything, it's that this team from Faenza, Italy does not mind a low fuel run or two in testing.
And if they did go for lower fuel runs, then there will be quite a lot of head scratching going on, because the car wasn't that fast. It looks very understeer-y which is at least predictable and manageable, but any drastic balance doesn't bode well for maintaining pace over a stint, something which was evident last year as the team often fell backward in races from fairly lofty qualifying positions.
Haas: B-
Here and now I don't know how to assess Hass' performance in the Bahrain tests. Compared to the rest of the field, they only did more laps than McLaren, which is not great. But by their own standards (of recent times, at least) it was a much better experience. Starting off, the return of Kevin Magnussen to the team and the departure of the unfavored Russian Nikita Mazepin has drastically changed both the outlook and atmosphere within the team. All you have to do is go on Haas' social media channels, and there are probably more pictures of Magnussen over three days of testing than pictures of Nikita from the last 18 months. People are laughing, and more importantly, people seem to be motivated.
On track, the car is extremely difficult to judge. The main concern is reliability: the car seems to have a fondness for falling apart, which is far from ideal. However, the team's competitive outlook seem a world away from the anguish of perpetually qualifying p19 and p20 with essentially zero hope of scoring points. Yes, their two best times were set conspicuously after-hours (the team was given extra time after a late start) when nobody could see what they were doing. But, their two best times were good enough to put them fastest overall on day 2 and second fastest overall on day 3. I think it's likely they ran essentially qualifying runs, but they still were fast; something they haven't been for over two years.
Alfa Romeo: B-
After a borderline shambolic showing in Spain a few weeks ago, when the team barely could operate the car without it tearing itself to pieces, the second test was a much better experience for the Swiss-Italian Alfa Romeo team. They completed a respectable amount of laps and the car looked to be stable enough to at least be competitive in the midfield.
However, much like Haas, the car still seemed to have a habit of leaving the pits and breaking down before it could come back. As Valtteri Bottas pointed out, it's not guaranteed that the team will even finish the first race, because although they have solved the reliability problems they have had so far, more keep arising. That's not exactly an encouraging word from the team's new lead driver, even if it is true.
Alpine: C
I already think this is too harsh of a rating and I haven't even published this yet. Alpine are very hard to rate; they are the only ones using the radically overhauled Renault engine, so we can't be sure if the team are sandbagging on the straights or not. They never really looked all that fast, or all that stable, for that matter, but the team seems extremely optimistic and confident after what they called a "fantastic" test.
Watching the car go around the track, it certainly doesn't look that comfortable or stable, and Alonso and Ocon seem to have to work quite hard just to keep the thing in a straight line. Looking at the car, it doesn't seem to have a specific standout feature; its front wing is fairly conventionally loaded, the nose is fairly standard, likewise the suspension and the sidepods. I would call this the most conservative car on the grid, but the benefits of that are A) typically the most conservative car won't be the slowest in the field; and B) A conservative car is fairly easy to develop because there isn't some odd feature you have to design around. Time will tell if Alpine will make good on their promise to march up the field, but the A522 doesn't look like it will knock them down any more than they already were.
Need Improvement
McLaren: D
These two teams really are the only ones with major issues during the test, with one team having an issue across all three days, and the other only on one day but suffering more. McLaren is the former, wherein the team surprisingly struggles to make its front brakes last long enough to do any runs of over 10 laps. The team wound up with the least amount of laps of any team across the test, and to make things worse, only Lando Norris could drive, because Daniel Ricciardo was sidelined from COVID.
The most worrying thing about McLaren's problems is the fact that the team was not able to remedy the issue across the three days of testing. The MCL36 has very aggressive front brake ducts, but it seems as if the simple solution of just making them bigger to have more cooling air flow through the brakes was not enough. By their own admission, the team is in a "race against time" to get things ready before the first race, and if they don't, then we could be looking at a double DNF for the team in orange on Sunday, even if the car looks decently quick.
Williams: D
After an encouraging start to the year in Barcelona, things literally crashed and burned in Bahrain for Williams. The first and third day of the test were relatively smooth, and the car racked up the miles. But on the second day, the team lost more or less the whole day after an "operational error" led to the rear brakes overheating. This in itself isn't too bad, but the rear brakes got so hot that they burst into flames, and then melted the rear suspension, causing Nicholas Latifi to spin before he was relegated to the role of firefighter. To make things even more bizarre, the brake discs appeared to explode, which could have resulted in some very serious injuries.
The brake fire was clearly the biggest blunder by any of the teams across the three days in the desert, but even when the car was running normally, it seemed to lack some grip. The drivers could be regularly seen locking the front wheels under braking, and the car looked generally unstable. The team ended the test slowest of all, and although their deficit is not representative, I would not be surprised to see the team end up knocked out in Q1 come Saturday.
What grades would you give the teams in testing?
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