After years of hype and preparation, Formula 1’s new technical era for 2026 got underway this week in Barcelona in somewhat unusual fashion.
The first preseason outings for the all-new cars and engines took place behind closed doors at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in Spain, with teams permitted to test their cars on three days between Monday and Friday.
The ‘shakedown’ (as it was marketed) was an important milestone before the new season. For newcomers Cadillac and Audi, it was a landmark moment to simply get their cars out for extended test running for the very first time.
The front-running group of McLaren, Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull took this as an early opportunity to lay the foundations for their championship hopes this year — with one impressing the most — while there were setbacks for Aston Martin, which managed barely a day of running, and Williams, which missed the shakedown entirely.
With two tests still to come in Bahrain, the Barcelona running was largely an opportunity for teams to get to know their new cars and hone their operations rather than outright car performance.
Yet there are still some clues from this week’s test running going into 2026.
Mercedes lived up to its early favorite tag
After dominating when F1 last changed engines in 2014, Mercedes was always going to have plenty of attention as we enter the new ruleset.
Its performance in Barcelona did absolutely nothing to dilute that. If anything, it only cemented the team’s way-too-early status as the favorite.
George Russell and Kimi Antonelli managed a whopping 500 laps over three days, including 183 — close to three race distances — on Wednesday alone. The new W17 car appeared to run largely trouble-free, with the team only citing “minor issues” in its recap.
The display caught the eye of the rest of the paddock. Team sources from across the grid, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Athletic they were impressed by how strongly Mercedes had performed over the three days in Barcelona.
Russell was eager to downplay reading too much into the lap times set, as it’s only a shakedown and the track was colder than any normal F1 circuit, given it’s January. But there was nothing but positivity coming out of the Briton in his post-session interviews.
“I’m looking forward to Bahrain, but just looking forward to going racing, and to really see where we all shake out,” Russell told F1 TV on Thursday evening.
Even with all the applicable asterisks, this was about as good a start as Mercedes could have hoped for in Barcelona.
Charles Leclerc during the Barcelona test (Xavier Bonilla / DPPI)
Positives for McLaren, Ferrari despite different approaches
McLaren’s willingness to be aggressive with its car design last year and to push the boundaries of an already strong baseline from 2024 helped it win both championships. It’s therefore little surprise that it retained that same mentality going into the new season and the first laps for the MCL40 car.
The team laid out its plans early, revealing last week that it would wait until the second or third day of the test to gain extra days of development time. Chief designer Rob Marshall claims McLaren’s car in Barcelona will not change dramatically until Melbourne, indicating the team is putting an earlier focus on performance than some of its rivals. The team will have no private shakedown; its title-defending car’s first laps will be in front of the competition.
But when Lando Norris, now running No. 1 as world champion, turned the car’s first laps on Wednesday morning, it immediately ran smoothly out of the box. He managed 77 laps on the first day of running before the team’s only real setback on Thursday afternoon, when a fuel system issue limited Oscar Piastri to just 48 laps in the morning.
A very productive Friday took McLaren up to 288 laps in total for the test. Despite the encouraging first signs, it is still well short of Mercedes’ mileage, indicating there is work ahead for the constructors’ champion.
Ferrari planned a very different approach for the test. Its team principal, Fred Vasseur, said in December that he anticipated the team would bring a basic car specification to Barcelona to ensure all systems were working properly before then chasing performance from Bahrain onwards — a hint there may be much more to come.
Regardless, the lap count (436 for the test) and lap times were encouraging, as was the feedback from Lewis Hamilton, whose emphasis on mileage pointed to Ferrari’s focus in Barcelona. That didn’t stop the seven-time world champion from putting in the fastest lap of the test in the final 15 minutes of Friday’s session.
“Last year we had a worse start to testing, so considering this completely new band of rules, it’s better than what we’ve experienced in the past,” Hamilton told F1 TV. “I’m really hoping that continues.”
Hadjar’s crash a blip for Red Bull, engines start well
Laurent Mekies, Red Bull’s F1 boss, has used the word “crazy” to describe the scale of the team’s new in-house engine program. With support from Ford, Red Bull has built its very first F1 engine for 2026, powering its own team and the sister Racing Bulls outfit.
Mekies said it was “naive” to think Red Bull could immediately be on the same level as Ferrari and Mercedes, with all their years of experience and long history of making F1 engines. He said at Red Bull’s launch this month that the team would face a “fair amount of struggles” but “eventually come out on top.”
So, the Red Bull/Ford engines enjoying such smooth running through the Barcelona shakedown should be taken as a big win. Across the two teams, the new engines completed 622 laps (Racing Bulls 319, Red Bull 303) with Racing Bulls encountering no major problems on its three days of running.
The greater setback was at the senior Red Bull team after Isack Hadjar, who stepped up from Racing Bulls for 2026, crashed in just his second day behind the wheel of the RB22 car.
Isack Hadjar didn’t have the smoothest testing week (Rudy Carezzevoli / Getty Images)
After completing the full first day of the test, Hadjar split Tuesday with teammate Max Verstappen. But toward the end of the afternoon session, the Frenchman spun on the damp track and hit the wall, damaging his car. The team could not get the car back out until the last day, Friday, and although it still managed nearly three days of running, having to complete repairs at a time when spare parts are at their most limited is hardly ideal.
Hadjar will also need to ensure the early crash does not knock his confidence. He’s the latest in a long line of drivers to take up the seat next to Verstappen — in 2019, Pierre Gasly also crashed in testing, setting the tone for a rough half-season with Red Bull before being demoted — and needs to eliminate any doubt to avoid the same fate.
Aston Martin and Williams have ground to make up
The first Aston Martin F1 car designed by Adrian Newey, perhaps the greatest technical mind in F1 history, was always going to be an exciting moment. The team shared a photo of it leaving the garage with the caption, “By design.”
The Adrian Newey designed AMR26 breaks cover.
By design.#AMR26 pic.twitter.com/SNpcicze32
— Aston Martin Aramco F1 Team (@AstonMartinF1) January 29, 2026
What wasn’t “by design” was that moment coming late on the fourth day of the shakedown.
As radical as the AMR26 car may appear, especially when looking at the design of the sidepods, engine cover, and suspension layout compared to the rest of the grid, the fact that the team could only manage one full day of running on Friday is hardly an encouraging sign going into the new season.
Lance Stroll completed five laps on Thursday evening before stopping on the track as a precautionary measure, according to the team. On Friday, Fernando Alonso got a feel for the Newey-designed car he has long craved through his F1 career, recording 66 laps. The two-time world champion came close in the past when working with F1’s most decorated car designer, and the pair have long shared mutual respect for their achievements. Now they are finally united.
Regardless of the innovations and the grand plan to become a world championship team, Aston Martin would not have been planning to start such a big year 429 laps behind the benchmark team (Mercedes).
The same is true of Williams, which decided last week to skip the Barcelona test altogether due to delays in part production. Team principal James Vowles told reporters on Tuesday that although Williams could have made the test, doing so would’ve compromised the upgrade and parts plan for the Bahrain running and the start of the season.
Vowles was adamant Williams won’t be behind for missing Barcelona, noting there were “zero points for running in a shakedown test.” While accurate, it’s impossible that being 500 test laps behind is anything but a big setback for Williams. And although the team has been completing some valuable Virtual Track Testing on a rig at its factory this week, that’s something other teams did before going to Barcelona.
For two teams that have long targeted 2026 as a year to step forward, starting late is hardly an encouraging sign.
Drivers are warming to the 2026 cars
When drivers got their first virtual taste of what the 2026 F1 cars would be like in the simulators last year, the response was tepid. Charles Leclerc’s comment in July that the new models — an early version in the sim at least — were “less enjoyable” than the 2025 cars was hardly a ringing endorsement for the new era F1 was hurtling toward.
Much has changed since then, and the overall verdict from the all-important real-world debut of the 2026 cars in Barcelona was largely positive. With an emphasis on energy management thanks to the uptick in electrical power, the introduction of active aerodynamics and a slight reduction in the size and weight of the cars, the drivers have found the new challenge refreshing.
“I take it as a challenge,” Leclerc told F1 TV this week. “I actually quite like that everything is new and then there might be an opportunity for us drivers to think outside the box.”
Norris’ first feedback was that the car felt “pretty different,” adjusting to slower cornering, greater acceleration and higher straight-line speed.
“It’s a bit more of a challenge in many places, which is a good thing, but then you have a bit more to understand from the battery, the power unit,” Norris said. “All of those things are in some ways more complicated, and just different.”
Racing Bulls’ Arvid Lindblad on day three in Spain this week (Rudy Carezzevoli / Getty Images)
F1’s test that wasn’t a test made for a strange week
For all the fuss around the test — sorry, ‘shakedown’ — taking place behind closed doors, teams ultimately had little to fear. This was no repeat of 2014’s overhaul. All the teams ran largely reliably and there were no major embarrassments playing out in front of the public and the media.
Yet it still made for an odd week. Besides the teams’ own social media output, captured from inside the track, and F1 itself issuing some recaps, the primary footage of the test has come through ultra-zoomed videos captured by those staking out the nearby hills.
The Athletic’s Guillermo Rai wrote a great story about his attempts to watch the test, conveying a sense of camaraderie among those trying to catch a glimpse of the cars — even when “betrayed by a motorcyclist guard.”
But after such an odd week to start F1’s on-track running in 2026, some normality will resume in two weeks at the first Bahrain test. The picture of which teams have the early edge should become a little clearer.
