Pre-season testing sessions should not be overestimated. This was true in the past and is particularly true in the present. The new cars are so unknown for everyone that each team had to collect data first. At the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, everyone checked what actually arrived on the racetrack from the wind tunnel and CFD. Whether the airflow actually does what the engineers expected in theory. How the Pirelli 18-inch tires work with ground-effect cars.
The drivers also have a lot of work to do and reprogram their driving style: “Above all, the braking is different.” Together with their engineers, they searched for the best settings for the cars, while the sometimes strong bouncing on the straights got in the way. That alone obscures the true performance of the cars, as well as the usual unknowns of fuel quantity and engine tuning.
“It’s difficult to really classify the performance of the cars and the competitiveness of the individual teams,” says Ferrari team boss Mattia Binotto. “Only in Bahrain will we see qualifying and racing simulations. Then we can make better statements.”
Massive package from Mercedes?
The new cars could already be old again during the tests in Bahrain. Then, it is said, the teams will only reveal their cards. “No one pushed in Barcelona. The teams have at least one second left in their pockets,” believes Pirelli race director Mario Isola. Some solutions were deliberately not shown at the test not far from the Catalan metropolis, so that the competition cannot copy them until the start of the new Formula 1 season. This has become easier with the new cars cleared of air turbulence, because no longer around 400 aero elements as before, but only around 60. But with only one week between testing and the first Grand Prix, there is no time to react.
In Barcelona, Ferrari and McLaren came off the blocks best. At least that’s what the engineers at Mercedes and Red Bull say, who certainly don’t mind if the whole world believes that the traditional teams are favorites. The two top teams of recent years are said to have large upgrade packages for the test drives in Bahrain. Red Bull’s sporting director Helmut Marko nods his head when asked. According to information from the competition, Mercedes’ should be a huge one. The constructors champions neither confirm nor deny it. “Everyone will fly to Bahrain with new parts. In the first few races everyone will be full of energy.”
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Another sentence from the Mercedes warehouse makes you sit up and take notice. “The biggest upgrades are usually the ones that you can’t tell from the outside.” If Mercedes makes changes under the panel, that actually speaks for a semi-new car. The question is what the engineers want to pack tighter in the first place. The sidepods are practically non-existent anyway. Maybe the Silver Arrow will slim down to the minimum weight of 795 kilograms thanks to new lightweight components. Red Bull says: “We would be happy if we could achieve 70 percent of what comes from Mercedes. Their package should be massive.”
Ferrari takes a different approach
Most of the changes to the RB18 are meant to be visible to outsiders. The new parts are not expected directly for the test start on March 10th. One by one they will be added to the car. All teams are sweating: The production department is running at full speed in all factories. “As soon as we have produced new parts, we bring them. We strive for a continuous development process,” reveals McLaren team boss Andreas Seidl. For Bahrain, the team from Woking expects supplies from home.
Ferrari is reportedly going a different route than Mercedes and Red Bull. “Our car is generally behaving well and as expected. It won’t look much different in Bahrain than in Barcelona. For us it’s about optimizing the package and getting everything out of it . There is still a lot to be done, also as far as the drivers are concerned,” says the team boss. That could be a clever approach: Ferrari should at least not confuse itself. We’ve seen many times in the past that new parts don’t always promise fast progress because it can take time to understand all the interactions and implications. Mercedes and Red Bull would have to get to know their cars again.
The different approaches of the teams in this Bahrain testing session are particularly exciting under the budget cap. Whoever rolled around in Barcelona with a half-finished car bought two to three weeks more development time for the actual package at the start of the season. But then you had to be particularly sure that the tools in the factory, such as the wind tunnel and CFD, were accurate. If the correlation isn’t right, no upgrades will do anything.
