The sixth season of Drive to Survive, Netflix’s blockbuster behind-the-scenes sportumentary, went live today. This isn’t a review of that. Instead, for the past few days my attention has been turned to Formula 1’s preseason testing, which got underway on Wednesday morning at the Bahrain International Circuit in Bahrain.
In the olden days, preseason testing was a thing you’d read about in the specialty press—a reason to buy a copy of Autosport in February, if you will. There was a lot more of it back then, too; up to five official preseason tests, although it was unusual for a team to attend all of them.
In F1’s current era, there isn’t really time for so much testing, even if it weren’t strictly limited by the rules. The first race of what should be a 24-race calendar takes place next Saturday (March 2), with the final round, also in the Middle East, not scheduled until December 8. Contrast that with the early 2000s, when a season might run for 16 or 17 races between early March and mid-October.
Back then, none of the preseason testing would be broadcast to fans, either. Now, thanks to F1’s streaming platform, there are 24 hours of coverage to keep you occupied, with each eight-hour day covered by an English-language commentary team that combines some of F1’s own (yay, Sam Collins!) with some voices more familiar to Sky’s (and therefore ESPN’s) coverage, like the always-excellent Anthony Davidson.
While I imagine the committed F1 fan will also add in all 10 hours of DtS season six, you’re unlikely to get nearly as good of a technical insight into the new cars or come away with a better understanding of what the drivers are doing in the cars to extract such speed so consistently.
Don’t read much into the times
An important thing to know about preseason testing is that it’s very difficult to read much into any of the lap times. The cars aren’t subject to scrutineering checks the way they are during a race weekend, and some teams aren’t above putting together a so-called glory lap to top the timesheets and maybe attract a sponsor or two.
These days, that’s far less likely than sandbagging—intentionally driving a car slowly at certain points during a lap, perhaps—to hide one’s true pace. Instead, each team has its own run plan designed to satisfy the needs of the engineers.
Rarer still is the team that shows up with something revolutionary that blows everyone else into the weeds. But it does happen—check out Keanu Reeves’ Brawn: The Impossible F1 Story for a 21st-century example of such a sporting fairytale.
What’s changed in the offseason?
There have been no real changes to the technical regulations for this year, but every team has a new car that reflects their better understanding of how the current ruleset needs to be best exploited.
The key to generating useful aerodynamic downforce from a current F1 car’s ground effect is to keep the car as stable as possible under both braking and accelerating, which means controlling dive at the front axle and countering lift at the rear axle. For 2024, some teams have had a fundamental rethink of how they do that.
George and Lewis will push the WhatsApp button to talk to their race engineers.Kym Illman/Getty Images
Ferrari topped the time sheets on days two and three, and the car looks fast in long runs as well as qualifying simulations.Mario Renzi – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images
Mercedes (and the teams it supplies engines to) have moved to rear pushrod suspension.Peter Fox – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images
Sauber is a good example of a team that’s kept as much of the car bare carbon as possible.Mark Thompson/Getty Images
Visa Cash App RB is a daft name for a team. And while I’m complaining, should Red Bull really be allowed to own two teams? I can’t think of another sport where someone can own more than one franchise.Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty Images
Long-serving Red Bull team boss Christian Horner is looking less secure in his position thanks to an ongoing internal investigation regarding inappropriate behavior towards a subordinate.Mark Thompson/Getty Images
There’s a new boss at Haas, Ayao Komatsu.NDREJ ISAKOVIC/AFP via Getty Images
Aston Martin’s car looks like it handles well, but might not have the pace of either Ferrari or Mercedes.Mark Thompson/Getty Images
You’d think two French teammates in a French team might be a recipe for harmony, but Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly don’t really have the best relationship.Clive Mason/Getty Images
Alex Albon drove last year’s Williams into some points-paying positions when the track suited the car. This year Williams says it has a car with a much wider operating window.Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty Images
Kick Sauber and RB (yes, those are real names) are joining Red Bull and McLaren in using pullrods (instead of pushrods) for their front suspension. Meanwhile, Mercedes, Aston Martin, and Williams have switched to rear pushrods, which interfere less with the underbody aerodynamics, leaving just Ferrari and their client Haas sticking with rear pullrods.
The floor might generate more of the downforce now, but that doesn’t mean bodywork isn’t important. Red Bull’s looks significantly different, incorporating ideas tried with varying success at other teams like Ferrari’s “bathtub sidepod” or Mercedes’ “zero sidepod.”
Truthfully, the most immediately noticeable difference from last year has been more teams opting to forgo a full-body paint job, preferring large expanses of bare carbon fiber in the name of saving another kilo or two. And if you’re looking for nerd trivia to bore impress someone with, the Mercedes drivers now have a WhatsApp button on their steering wheel to use to radio back to the pits.
What are the teams and drivers doing at the test?
Even with 24 hours of track time available, each team is still limited in what it can do. And although each team has both of its race drivers (plus various reserves) at the track, they’re all only allowed to run a single car.
“Three days is never enough, though—you try to do as much as possible, but you can’t do everything. It’s about setting priorities and establishing what you want to accomplish most of all,” said Stoffel Vandoorne, test and reserve driver at Aston Martin.
Often, we see cars adorned with complicated latticeworks of sensors, or smeared with fluorescent “flow-viz” paint. This is all in service to the aerodynamics. “You’re measuring airflow on the car to confirm that what you’re seeing and experiencing on track correlates with what all the simulator and wind tunnel work over the winter has been saying,” Vandoorne said.
If all is running well, that data correlates well and matches up with how the drivers want their cars to behave at the limit. “You’re in constant dialogue with your engineers. You’re relaying feedback, coming up with ideas, discussing solutions—that’s how you develop the car to ensure that it’s giving you the confidence to be able to push it to the limit and deliver the quickest laptime,” Vandoorne said.
The organizers use the tests to go through some procedures, too—the mock safety car restart toward the end of day two looked rather spectacular with showers of sparks coming from titanium skid blocks under the cars as the pack hit the brakes for the first turn.
It’s still the Max show
Earlier, I said it’s hard to read too much into lap times during preseason testing, and a good illustration of that is the fact that Max Verstappen remains very much feared by the rest of the grid despite only going fastest on day one. The young world champion appears to still have the same almost supernatural level of car control and logged 142 laps that day, ending up 1.1 seconds faster than Mclaren’s Lando Norris on the same tire compound.
While spending some time in the F1TV commentary booth yesterday, Williams driver Alex Albon predicted Verstappen winning next weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix with enough time to make a pit stop for fresh tires to then break the lap record.
Similarly demoralized, Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso said, “I think 19 drivers in the paddock now will think that [they] will not win the championship. It happens 99 percent of the time in your career. This is a brutal sport.”
But competition between the remaining 19 may be even tighter than last year, which means the promise of yet more exciting racing as long as you’re OK with being excited about who comes second.
The bright red Ferraris—perhaps still buzzing from the offseason shock reveal that is Lewis Hamilton’s 2025 team switch from Mercedes—experienced a little unwanted deja vu from Las Vegas on day two when part of a drain cover at an exit curb came loose and damaged the floor of their car.
Charles LeClerc was in the car at the time. The damage was not as severe as when teammate Carlos Sainz came into contact with a (much larger, heavier) buried water valve that time, but it still needed a floor replacement.
That led to an hour-long red flag for some circuit fixes, and with Sainz driving in the afternoon, Ferrari topped day two’s timesheet. “We managed to go through the whole afternoon program smoothly, combining various tests with low and high fuel runs, so it was interesting to get a feel for this year’s car in different configurations,” Sainz said.
Today saw another red flag period to fix the turn 11 draincover again. This time, the interruption was around 30 minutes, and the organizers decided to run the day as just a single eight-hour session rather than break for lunch. Ferrari finished fastest of all for a second time, with LeClerc posting a lap time of 1:30.322, 46 milliseconds faster than George Russell in this year’s Mercedes.
That team appears far more on the pace than it has at the start of either of the previous two seasons of the ground effect era. “We’ve clearly made an improvement with this year’s car, and it’s much nicer to drive,” said Hamilton. “We’ve still got progress to make, of course. But this is a good foundation for us to build on,” he said after getting out of the car on day two.
Wait for qualifying
Everyone will have to wait until qualifying next Friday to get a true sense of the real pecking order, though. (The start of Ramadan means both the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian races each take place a day early this year.) Last year, the storyline was mostly about how fast the Aston Martin was, a fact starkly evident thanks to Ferrari and Mercedes fumbling the ball.
That doesn’t appear to be the case in 2024. McLaren ended last year with a much faster car than it started with, and it, too, looks like it’s starting this year without any unwanted drama. RB—Minardi that was, now the Red Bull farm team—has probably moved up the grid, having now integrated itself more closely into the main Red Bull team in the UK.
Alpine and Sauber fans are probably used to a lot of mid-field finishes and are in for more of the same this season. Haas is no longer run by DtS star Guenther Steiner, but by new team principal Ayao Komatsu, previously the team’s well-liked engineering director.
Komatsu ended the day upbeat: “Our race simulations show that yes, we’ve got lots more work to do, but at the same time we’ve got a base car that we can actually race. Considering the qualifying performance—we haven’t worked on it at all, today was our first time looking at it, but again, it was decent. We’ve had a very good start to the season with all this preparation in testing,” he said.
Williams has a car that’s so different from last year’s that Alex Albon told F1TV it feels like he’s switched teams. Williams lost time on day one with mechanical troubles, but American Logan Sargeant looks more at home in the cockpit this year, and the team is an optimistic one going into 2024.
Beyond Bahrain, prognostication becomes even harder. Each of the next few circuits asks for different things from the cars, like high top speeds for the long straights in Saudi Arabia but as much grip as possible for the marvelous Esses at Suzuka in Japan.
Meanwhile, an equally flat-out race is about to get underway at each team factory and within each design office. As their cars have run on track these past three days, they’ve gathered up vast quantities of data from hundreds of sensors on top of or inside of the cars. Team photographers will have hundreds, perhaps thousands of images both of their race cars and their rivals’ cars.
Now, it’s time to make use of all that data. The aerodynamicists need to correlate their real-world findings with the results from wind tunnel and computational fluid dynamics simulations. The race engineers need to understand how to optimize their car setup, and everyone must think about how to improve what they’ve already come up with, preferably faster than the nine other teams that are all trying to do the same. Apparently, the first upgrades might show up as early as April.