Formula 1’s closed Barcelona test was meant to protect teams from too much scrutiny and give fragile new cars and engines a safer space in which to log their initial laps.
So far, it seems they need not have worried – and the desire for secrecy has ended up rather unnecessary. The early running in Spain is instead a story that F1 should be aching to tell.
“Surprisingly we managed to do a lot more laps than we expected,” Red Bull driver Isack Hadjar said after his team’s first day its brand new, in-house engine.
“Everything went pretty smoothly. We had only minor issues. So it’s quite impressive considering it’s our first day with our own engine. It was definitely smooth.”
Big setbacks might be just around the corner, so do not expect teams to get complacent and declare the new rules to be conquered already, but the mileage teams managed on the opening day is a quite stunning achievement.
Brand new engines, built to a near-50/50 split between the internal combustion engine and electric power, are for the most part running extremely well. The cars that have been somewhat bastardised to get those engines to function as efficiently as possible are working despite a compressed build time. And advanced sustainable fuels predicted to cause headaches have so far – assuming they are being used, of course, as they are not actually mandatory in this test – have not made anybody go bang.
“It’s a testament to, in some cases, years of preparation for these early days,” said Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin.
The teams managed more than 400km each on average on day one, which is almost eight times as much as the disastrous 2014 test – and three teams on Monday exceeded the total day-one mileage from all teams in 2014 on their own.
The 400+km average is also more than in 2017, and not far off 2022. Given these new rules have been widely heralded as the largest overhaul anyone currently active in F1 has ever experienced, that is really quite exceptional, and a testament to just how well some of these programmes have been managed plus how much more robust the virtual and remote simulation work is that has been developed.
It’s something George Russell noticed. He took a question about how much confidence he takes from Mercedes’ strong start, and turned it into a comment about how impressed he was with several others – name-checking what new engine manufacturer Red Bull accomplished, and of course Haas with its Ferrari engine.
“For sure we’re very pleased with the day, but I was pretty impressed with a number of other teams, to be honest,” he said.
“You see the Red Bull-powered teams, [with] a brand-new power unit, and they had a really smooth day with two cars. Haas did the most laps of everyone with a Ferrari engine.
“So it’s not quite 2014 vibes of half the grid is breaking down and having loads of issues. Formula 1 has evolved so much since then and the level is just so high, from every single aspect.
“It was pretty impressive to see all the teams on the whole having a lot of laps under their belts on day one.”
What that 2014 debut was like
Day one of 2014 testing has become F1 shorthand for ‘a disastrous and embarrassing start to a new rules era’, as the turbo hybrid regulations arrived with the wrong sort of bang.
The Lotus (now Alpine) team didn’t make it to the Jerez test week at all, and of the 10 teams that were ready, only eight got on track, only six of those actually managed a timed lap, two of them had lap tallies in single figures and the pace spread from fastest to slowest was just over 15 seconds.
Even the Mercedes team that went on to dominate that season and beyond didn’t have a smooth day – Lewis Hamilton setting the early pace but then ended his day in the barriers after a dramatic front wing failure, as the teams’ headaches spread beyond the new engines.
And on that occasion, the media was there in full force to watch the likes of McLaren failing to get out of the garage on day one and reigning champion squad Red Bull managing just three in/out laps at the end of the day. The total lap count for the day across all teams was just 93 – a mammoth 564 lower than day one of the previous season’s first test.
Things soon improved (for most teams anyway, less so for Red Bull-Renault). The lap tally on the fourth and final day was a much healthier 698, McLaren actually ended up setting the pace, and by the time of the season-opening Australian Grand Prix 13 of the 22 starters finished. That’s woeful attrition by 2020s standards, but significantly better than was being predicted when 2014 limped into life on that first day of Jerez testing.
There have been problems. New engine manufacturer Audi hit trouble on day one, spotting an issue that prompted it to stop the car on track. This prevented any afternoon running and left it with the slowest time and lowest mileage count of the seven teams on day one. Alpine overcame a brief stoppage of its own with its new Mercedes engine to get back on track. Racing Bulls did likewise after a precautionary systems shutdown early in the afternoon.
And yes, Aston Martin is not going to make its three-day allocation for the week, only starting on Thursday at the earliest, while Williams has not made it to the test at all.
So, it could be argued that this ‘just’ being a glorified shakedown week, and without the bigger focus that a ‘real’ test would draw, has helped teams and manufacturers that have found the massive rules overhaul and condensed timelines a bit too hard to manage by the end of January.
Equally if this test had more weight to it, maybe those teams would have found a way to be there even in compromised form. If the test did not exist at all, they would have more time to get ready for what would instead be the opening test in Bahrain – which the other teams seem pretty much ready to go and maximise anyway.
The achievement not being amplified as much as it should is ultimately the price paid for being protected from bad publicity.
This shouldn’t really have been a factor in the first place. Reliability problems are a part of testing and they either get quite quickly resolved and fade to nothing or they become a legitimate problem – in which case a competitor in an elite sporting competition needs to front up to a shortcoming.
This week is the unfortunate result of the fears that existed many months ago when the notion of a closed test was finalised and plans were not altered subsequently.
Perhaps some teams – if they really were responsible – should have had a little more faith in what they were doing, or perhaps they always suspected this test could genuinely be smooth and just liked the rare leeway given by the rulemakers to be out of the spotlight.
Regardless of where you stand on that, what most teams have managed should be lauded. Reliability gets taken for granted in modern F1 but the potential for another 2014-level disaster was there and has been emphatically avoided.
“Behind the scenes it’s a huge amount of work,” said Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu, whose team clocked a day one high of 154 laps.
“I’m sure it’s the same for everyone, but to even make the shakedown and then do full mileage on shakedown was a huge task. That was Saturday and then coming from Fiorano to get us ready to run on Monday morning here and then to do 67 laps on day one morning was really good.
“It [the project] has been absolutely huge. Very satisfying that we hit our target of doing the shakedown and to be ready for day one of this Barcelona test.
“Now we’re running, we’re discovering issues, problems, we need to solve every run. But that’s what we’re here for, at least we’re running. That means we get the data, identifying issues we need to solve.
“I’m very, very happy with how we started.”
