Pre-season testing isn’t the stuff of dreams, but it can be the stuff of nightmares.
Three days of relentless running in the Bahrain sun, drivers tested to their limits after months out of the car, machines pushed the brink and beyond failure, is gruelling work.
If it goes well, you’ll make it to Sunday with your car and your neck muscles intact but only a rough idea of where you think you stand in the pecking order. Ambiguity is the reward.
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If it goes badly, you’ll know for sure that you won’t win the championship. Only nine months and 23 races to go until the next one.
Of course not every team is targeting the title, but the stakes are the same. The next three days will reveal to them whether they’re on target or have fallen woefully behind the curve — whether the last three months have been fruitful or all for naught.
We won’t have all the answers to our burning 2023 questions by the end of pre-season testing, but we’ll have an outline of what to expect this season.
Here’s what to watch for in the next three days of track action in Bahrain.
WHAT WILL THE RB19 ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE?
The launch season is over, but there’s still one team yet to reveal its championship challenger, and it happens to be the team to beat in 2023.
Red Bull Racing’s non-event of a launch — in which last year’s car was presented at this year’s machine for sponsorship purposes — and secretive shakedown program mean we’re yet to lay eyes on the car that Max Verstappen will wield to defend his title.
Other than an out-of-focus drive-by video posted to the team’s social media channels, the best we’ve got so far is a pair of Big Foot-style long-distance Twitter videos from Silverstone.
Another Twitter user helpfully blew up some screenshots from the spy footage, but the pixelated images give very little away. Make deductions at your peril
The first time we’ll see the true RB19 is when it breaks cover for pre-season testing. What we get will be fascinating for a couple of reasons.
The first is that this is the successor to 2022’s title winner. There’s little reason not to think this won’t be the car to beat at the start of the year, even considering the development restrictions placed on the team after breaking the cost cap.
The second is that Red Bull Racing is leading one particular school of thought on bodywork design philosophy under these rules, with Ferrari and Mercedes leading the other two.
Several teams have attempted to incorporate cues from last year’s RBR car into this year’s designs. What we don’t know is what RB19 has made of its development options from the current design. Will it have borrowed any ideas from other cars, or has it taken things in an unexpected direction?
Red Bull Racing set the benchmark last year. Soon we’ll know where it’s setting the bar in 2023.
WILL FERRARI AND ALPINE VALIDATE THEIR RELIABILITY FIXES?
Ferrari was heavily defeated in last year’s title but also left us with an enormous what-if.
What if the power unit had been reliable? What if the engine fix hadn’t been to reduce power?
Would the title fight have been any closer?
The Ferrari motor started last year as arguably the field’s best. Its unique configuration gave it unbeatable corner-exit performance that equalled out Honda’s prodigious straight-line speed. But of course it had this terrible habit of blowing up from time to time that made all that academic in the championship battle.
Fixing the engine, specifically the MGU-H, was the team’s focus during the off-season, and it’s been making all the right sounds about that issue having been resolved. There was even a rumour late last year that it had recovered more than 22 kilowatts as a result.
The team batted that figure away, but there’s no question that more power will result from improved reliability. With performance upgrades otherwise frozen, a fully firing Ferrari motor could see the team straight back into the game.
Alpine is in the same boat. It had the fourth quickest car last year — at times comfortably so — but only just nabbed that championship position from McLaren in the final round because due to woeful unreliability.
The problem with the Renault engine was put down to a humble water pump, the design of which was impossible to fix in last year’s car. The team has made it sound simple, and it says dyno running has already validated the repairs, but the sheer number of failures last year means track time is badly needed to finally tick this item off.
Three days of uninterrupted running for both teams will go a long way to convincing that each could be on for a strong year by their respective standards.
WHAT SOUNDS WILL MERCEDES BE MAKING AT THE END OF THE TEST?
Mercedes was careful to be measured during the launch of its all-black W14. It would be competing for wins again — “eventually”. The exact time frame was left deliberately vague.
Is the team being humble after last year’s pantsing or is it knowingly keeping expectations low after a substandard off-season?
The official Mercedes line is that it understood its 2022 problems but could only rectify them with a new car given modern F1’s budget and development constraints. It will still start this year off the pace, but the path should be clear to aggressively update the car and catch the frontrunners — eventually.
But there have been reports that Mercedes has in fact been underwhelmed by the numbers coming from the wind tunnel during the off-season. The mind-boggling downforce it thought it could unlock from its original philosophy still isn’t materialising. Toto Wolff has also suggested wholesale bodywork changes — including to those slimmed-down sidepods — could be coming early in the season.
“I wouldn’t say I’m bullish like I was last year,” Lewis Hamilton said. “I would say just more cautious.
“Hopefully we hit the ground running, but it’s not always the case. And I think we showed last year that, whatever we’re faced with, we can recover. So that’s what we’ll try and do this year.”
Divining performance from testing is always difficult, but it should be fairly easy to see whether Mercedes has genuinely fixed last year’s problems.
If the car is porpoising or bouncing, that’s an immediate red flag given it was one of the few teams not to get on top of those debilitating vibrations last year.
Proof that it’s mastered its ride quality is the bare minimum for optimism in this pre-season. Then it’s just a matter of figuring out how much ground it will have to make up — eventually.
Mercedes unveil new F1 livery for 2023 | 00:31
WHO’S SAVING THEIR BEST BITS UNTIL LATE?
The second year of sweeping new rules is a fascinating time for Formula 1 as the field deals with everything they learnt from the first roll of the dice last season.
Already we’ve seen most teams are coalescing around Red Bull Racing’s basic aero philosophy, while many have also taken some cues from Ferrari.
But just because most teams have emphasised that this year is all about evolution doesn’t exclude the possibility of someone finding a rules loophole and developing F1’s next must-have bit of kit.
Often the perceived significance of a new idea correlates with how late the team chooses to bolt it onto the car and reveal it to pit lane.
Red Bull Racing is renowned for keeping its power dry until late. It famously used to skip entire days of testing to maximise development, and in recent years it’s revealed entirely new body kits in the final days of the pre-season to catch rivals by surprise.
Last year it waited until the very last day of testing to bolt on its ultimately title-winning bodywork.
But the flip side of saving your development parts is that you can leave yourself with too little time to figure out and rectify unforeseen problems.
Mercedes also has form in this regard. In 2019 it brought a dramatically different car to the second week of testing and dominated the season, but last year it realised too late that its car was fatally flawed and was relegated to a supporting role in the title fight.
So far all teams have been cautious not to reveal too much about their cars. McLaren even recently released footage of its MCL60 with the floor blurred.
Is someone hiding the next big thing in F1?
WILL ANY MIDFIELD TEAMS UP-END THE ORDER?
The gap from the midfield to the leaders is large, but there was little to separate most of the seven lower teams last year.
The campaign started with a three-way battle between McLaren, Alpine and Alfa Romeo. Late in the year, after a series of upgrades, Aston Martin showed a decent turn of form to make itself a regular points contender.
Alpine is very punchy about the changes it’s made for 2023, and improved reliability should see it move forward considerably.
McLaren is keeping expectation in check but must surely be quietly optimistic that Oscar Piastri can score more regularly than Daniel Ricciardo did if the car has similar pace — the team missed out on fourth in the standings by only 14 points.
Aston Martin is growing at a ferocious pace and settling on a technical structure it thinks will drive it forward. There are rumours it’s had a better off-season than expected after its big gains late last year. And Fernando Alonso was in powerful form for much of 2022.
Alfa Romeo, now with its long-term future secured, will also be interesting to watch.
Further back, Haas says new funding will allow it to upgrade its car more than once this year. AlphaTauri also historically belongs higher than the disappointing ninth of 2022. Even Williams, with new team boss James Vowles, should be optimistic of improvement.
There’s plenty of potential for unexpected results in this group of tightly contested teams. Times are to be taken with much salt in testing, but we’ll get the first outlines of who’s making the biggest moves by the weekend.
WILL THREE DAYS BE ENOUGH TESTING FOR F1 NEW — AND OLD — STARS?
To save money in the last decade or so F1 has been slowly clamping down on testing to the point that a record-equalling 23-race season warrants only three days of pre-season.
That’s a maximum of 25.5 hours of track time for teams to discover, understand and fix any deep-seated problems by Saturday night, otherwise they’ll start eating into their grand prix weekends. It’s for this reason lap count can be a better indicator of overall health than pure lap time.
But if it’s rough for the teams, think about the drivers — particularly the rookies.
Oscar Piastri, Logan Sargeant and Nyck de Vries are all making their full-time debuts this year and Nico Hülkenberg is back from a multiyear hiatus. They’ll get something like 10 hours of track time and then be thrown into the championship season.
You’d be hard-pressed to find any other elite sport that demands perfection from such limited preparation.
This is difficult even for the experienced drivers, who haven’t races in 95 days. Bar the single day of post-season testing and the odd few kilometres of promotional running or tyre testing, drivers have seen no competitive action for more than a quarter of a year.
“Could you imagine Rafa Nadal spending 12 weeks without hitting a ball and then going straight into the French Open with one and a half days of training?” George Russell said, per The Race. “It would never happen.”
Given the proximity of testing to the first race — FP1 comes just five days later — Russell has suggested that teams be allowed to run two cars given the second machine would be close to completion anyway.
“I think that would probably be the best compromise for all of the reasons why they’re trying to limit it,” he said.
But it’s a debate for another day. Three crucial days of testing is all the teams and drivers will get. Whether they’re still on track or woefully off course by the end of it, the championship season will be coming at them fast in just three days time.
The next three days could make or break a season.
HOW CAN I WATCH IT?
All three days of pre-season testing are live on Fox Sports and Kayo.
Coverage starts from 5:50pm on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
