There are two golden rules to pre-season testing in the ground effect era.
(1) Don’t look at the times too early, as they’re unreliable indicators of the true field spread.
(2) Red Bull Racing is fastest.
The opening day of testing to 2024 is no exception to those rules.
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Red Bull Racing found itself comfortably on top of the pile, leaving a small group of closely matched cars to compete for second best, including one surprise constructor trying to leap up the grid.
Mercedes wasn’t among those team, though there are mitigating circumstances for the once-dominant German marque.
Meanwhile, two other constructors struggled badly on the first outing of the 2024 season, leaving much work to do on the remaining two days.
RED BULL RACING IS THE REAL DEAL
Max Verstappen and Red Bull Racing were the only true talking point of the first day. The reigning championship pairing was easily quickest and set the most laps of any team bar Haas, which was ironically anchored to the bottom of the time sheet.
Reliability is almost a given in the third year of a stable regulation set, but still the RB20’s relentlessness was impressive. Whereas other teams have either evolved their 2023 cars or adopted designs already well understood from the last two years, Red Bull Racing is breaking fresh ground.
By now you will have seen the car’s innovative sidepods, which appear to borrow from Mercedes’s last two failed designs.
The thin vertical air intakes are certainly reminiscent of the Mercedes ‘zero-pod’ cars, though they’re complemented with bespoke innovations, like the undercut inlets below the top of the sidepod shoulder. The bulbous ‘canon’ intakes over the driver’s shoulders are also new ideas.
Mercedes never got its slim design to perform in the real world despite what it was were two years of outrageously strong downforce numbers in the wind tunnel.
We might argue that RBR has taken the idea and made the necessary adaptations to make it work.
Its 1.14-second margin over the field — notwithstanding this is only testing — would certainly suggest it’s onto something.
As a point of comparison when times are nebulous, Verstappen was 1.493 seconds quicker than he was on day 1 of testing last year. Only half the grid was faster than last year’s benchmark, though no-one else came close to that margin.
Further, Verstappen’s 143 laps suggest there are no obvious reliability concerns, though it’s unlikely any team was pushing hard for performance on the first day. That could be a cause for both hope and trepidation.
The margin is very likely greatly exaggerated both by run plans — Red Bull Racing seemed to run with low fuel a little more often than its rivals — and the fact Verstappen was in the car all day, giving him a clear run to settle in and make the most of his machinery.
But with clear confidence brimming from the Red Bull Racing garage, it’s hard not to think even at this very early stage that it’s going to be very difficult to beat the reigning constructors champion this season.
“We came to Bahrain with a few unknowns around a relatively new car,” head of race engineering Gianpiero Lambiase said, per the F1 website. “But we have tested most of the fundamentals on day one and got the answers we needed.”
Ominous.
TESTING TIMES, DAY 1
1. Red Bull Racing (Max Verstappen): 1m 31.344s (143 laps)
2. McLaren (Lando Norris): +1.140s (130 laps)
3. Ferrari (Carlos Sainz): +1.240s (133 laps)
4. RB (Daniel Ricciardo): +1.255s (116 laps)
5. Alpine (Pierre Gasly): +1.461s (121 laps)
6. Aston Martin (Lance Stroll): +1.663s (131 laps)
7. Sauber (Zhou Guanyu): +2.527s (131 laps)
8. Williams (Logan Sargeant): +2.538s (61 laps)
9. Mercedes (George Russell): +2.765s (122 laps)
10. Haas (Kevin Magnussen): +4.348s (148 laps)
Fastest lap credited to driver in brackets. Lap count is combined total for both drivers where applicable.
THE NEW FRONTRUNNERS?
Testing gives us a shape of the field without being specific about the order, but already we can see what appears to be a frontrunning group emerging.
McLaren was most impressive among them, with Lando Norris setting the second-quickest time of the day in a car that has clearly evolved on the trajectory of last year’s fast-finishing machine.
Norris was only fractionally ahead of Ferrari (Carlos Sainz) and surprise packet RB (Daniel Ricciardo).
Ferrari appears confident the negative characteristics of last year’s car — the snappiness and unpredictability — have been expunged from its 2024 challenger, a good sign that the inherent speed the team had last year could be unlocked permanently.
But RB’s strong performance was most interesting. Some are already insinuating the terribly named VCARB-01 is something of an encore of last year’s title-winning RB19, which is sure to fire up some sections of the paddock unhappy about RB and Red Bull Racing’s stronger technical ties this season.
It’s also impressive considering the amount of change RB has endured over the off-season. Its management team is all new and its aerodynamics base in the UK has relocated to Milton Keynes, but it still appears — at this early stage — to have made a reasonable step forward despite the disruption.
If the pace holds — and we should hold fire until at least the final day of testing — it adds much spice to the battle for the second Red Bull Racing seat, with Ricciardo sure to back himself for a strong season if the car behaves anything like last year’s RB19.
Alpine set a quick time late, moving up into the top five ahead of the quietly confident Aston Martin. The green team is optimistic that this year’s car is a good step on the podium-getter it started with in 2023, with F1 reporting that the team’s on-track data gathering has correlated strongly with its wind tunnel figures — always a good sign at this stage of testing.
WHAT HAPPENED TO MERCEDES?
Mercedes ended its first day with its all-new car way down in ninth and close to three seconds off the pace, but things aren’t quite as bad as they seem.
The team didn’t appear to embark on any low-fuel running. Instead Mercedes has been fully focused on gathering a deep understanding of its new design to ensure it doesn’t fall into the same traps that caught it out last year, when some circuits would totally confound the car and when upgrade packages would produce patchy results.
The 122-lap count is what’s more important for Mercedes — though really the lap count is more important for every team given mileage means data, and data is the point of testing.
That said, there’s so far no sign of any major breakthrough despite the changed design. The bouncing that undermined its cars over the last two seasons does appear to have been dialled out, and George Russell said the car felt nicer to driver than last year’s model, but expectations are being kept well in check ahead of next week’s first race.
WHO HAS WORK TO DO
Pre-season testing is sometimes good at identifying who’s doing very well — Red Bull Racing — but will always reliably pick out the teams in trouble.
Two stand out strongly after the first day.
Williams pushed itself hard to deliver a fully developed car to Bahrain, eschewing a European shakedown in favour of a brief run the day before testing began.
The risk doesn’t appear to have paid off so far.
Williams’s day was marred by chronic unreliability. A fuel system failure stopped Alex Albon on track around half an hour before the lunch break with just 40 laps under his belt, while a suspected drive shaft issue halted Logan Sargeant’s afternoon after just 21 laps, leaving the team with comfortably the lowest lap count of any in the paddock.
The car appears to be a step forward in terms of the handling characteristics that troubled it last year, but that means little if it’s struggling to complete a race distance.
Haas appears to have the inverse problem. It completed the most laps of any team between Kevin Magnussen and Nico Hülkenberg, but it was in a league of its own way, way off the pace.
The team was clearly focused on data gathering rather than performance runs, so the margin is sure to come down by the end of the test, but new team boss Ayao Komatsu has warned Haas will endure a slow start to 2024. This may be the first glimpse at just how slow he meant.
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