Every F1 team assessed ahead of the 2026 Australian GP

The question around Mercedes is not only if it was sandbagging, but whether the performance shown in Bahrain is representative of a broader strength or if the W17 has a narrow operating window that favoured the conditions.

Last year, the team excelled in the cold; it may just be coincidental that the early Bahrain nights provided similar circumstances.

It remains to be seen whether that form will translate to all conditions, but rivals have broadly conceded that Mercedes is favourite going into Melbourne.

2. Ferrari

Ferrari set the fastest lap of the entire pre-season on the final day: Charles Leclerc‘s 1min 31.992sec effort in the SF-26 beat everyone across both tests. The team did so while also delivering one of the most technically intriguing cars of the new era.

The active rear wing, which rotated through more than 100 degrees and briefly appeared during the second test, generated more paddock talk than almost any other development seen in Bahrain.

Whether it represents a genuine performance advantage or just an engineering curiosity that serves a more specific purpose will only become clear in race conditions, but it highlighted Ferrari’s ambition to think unconventionally under the new rules.

The team ran a deliberately conservative Spec-A car through both Bahrain tests, and will bring a more developed package to Australia, but so will others.

On long runs the SF-26 looked smooth and fast, and Lewis Hamilton arrived in Bahrain sounding markedly more positive than he did a few months ago, describing testing as “really enjoyable.”

The combination of strong baseline pace and genuine technical innovation makes Ferrari one of the most intriguing prospects of the new season.

That said, it’s not a new position for Ferrari to be in. The Scuderia has looked strong in pre-season testing often over the past years, so it remains to be seen whether the hype is real.

3. McLaren

The back-to-back champions arrived in Bahrain as the team everyone else was measuring itself against, at least on paper, but the MCL40 did not immediately impose itself on proceedings the way the 2025 car so often did.

Both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri ran a relatively conservative programme, and on outright times, McLaren sat a little further back from the headline than its rivals expected.

There were small, niggly reliability interruptions that cost meaningful track time and prevented the kind of sustained race simulation running McLaren would have wanted.

A significant caveat is one the team is quietly confident about: McLaren is understood to have run a non-definitive specification of its Mercedes power unit throughout testing, and will bring the full-spec engine to Australia. That alone is expected to provide a meaningful performance step.

The chassis itself looks well-balanced if not yet spectacular, and when the two drivers were able to string longer runs together, the pace was there.

McLaren didn’t blow away its rivals, but it appears to have ammunition that it’s yet to fully deploy.

4. Red Bull

The story of Red Bull‘s pre-season was, to a significant extent, the story of its new engine.

The Red Bull-Ford Powertrains unit turned heads across the whole testing programme, both inside and outside the team, with its energy deployment on the straights drawing admiring glances from rivals who had broadly expected a new manufacturer to struggle.

That it ran reliably for the bulk of the programme, across both the Red Bull and Racing Bulls operations, is an achievement that should not be understated.

The chassis picture is more complicated, however. Max Verstappen looked very fast at times, but there were signs that the RB22 is not yet as sorted as it needs to be.

A crash from Isack Hadjar in Barcelona during the shakedown and reliability niggles in Bahrain meant the programme was not entirely clean.

Verstappen himself was a little under a second off the pace on the final day of testing, but the team is playing its cards close to its chest.

Its engine appears to be a genuine asset; the question is whether the chassis can make the most of it from race one.

5. Alpine

After a 2025 season in which Alpine finished dead last in the constructors’ championship, the bar for the A526 was set extremely low.

On that measure, Bahrain delivered something genuinely encouraging. The car has had a clean start, showing solid reliability and a reasonable baseline. Early indications of race pace suggest the team has successfully made the step up from backmarker.

Pierre Gasly was fifth on the combined timesheets on the final day, the leading midfield representative, and Franco Colapinto covered eight grand prix distances across shakedown and test running, building exactly the kind of preparation experience he needs.

The crucial question is whether Alpine, which has now switched to Mercedes power, has simply pulled itself away from the rear or whether it can genuinely contest points in Melbourne.

The early read suggests the former is almost certain and the latter is possible.

The scars of 2025 have kept expectations at Enstone deliberately measured, and the team is not getting carried away, but it appears to have every right to arrive in Australia with genuine optimism.

6. Haas 

Haas was, quietly, one of the most impressive stories of pre-season.

Over all three test phases, only Mercedes completed more laps, which for one of F1’s smallest teams represents a remarkable operational achievement under new regulations.

The VF-26 looked aerodynamically well-conceived and behaved predictably during long runs, with both Oliver Bearman and Esteban Ocon completing race simulations that placed them at the sharper end of the midfield.

The general consensus from the paddock is that Haas is punching towards the top of the midfield group, close to Alpine and Racing Bulls on the data seen.

The caveat is that Haas’s history is littered with strong winters followed by difficult seasons, as the team knows better than most.

The 2016 squad that burst onto the scene was the last time pre-season truly delivered on its promise for the American outfit, and there have been too many spring fades since to entirely trust the early form.

What is different this year is the underlying reliability: rarely has a Haas car run so cleanly over such an extended programme.

Haas has earned the right to be taken seriously heading into Melbourne, and if this level proves to be anything close to representative, it will start the year well ahead of where it finished in 2025.

7. Racing Bulls

Racing Bulls benefited from one of the most pleasant surprises of pre-season: the Red Bull-Ford power unit has been everything the team could have hoped for in terms of performance and reliability.

Mileage across the six days was excellent, and the Faenza-based team was among the more productive on track.

Liam Lawson looked composed and purposeful, and rookie Arvid Lindblad — the youngest driver on the 2026 grid — showed genuine promise, accumulating impressive lap counts as he acclimatised to Formula 1 machinery at pace.

The honest assessment, though, is that Racing Bulls is likely to be where it tends to be: a well-run team with capable drivers that finds itself competing for the upper reaches of the midfield rather than the points positions occupied by the top four.

The engine is a genuine asset, and early race simulation data suggests it could be fighting the likes of Alpine and Haas rather than settling for the back of the midfield.

If that is roughly where it ends up, it would represent some progress, but in true Racing Bulls fashion, nothing to write home about.

8. Williams

Williams is definitely one of the teams that is not where it wants to be. The Grove squad came into 2026 already on the back foot, having missed the entire Barcelona shakedown due to production delays on the FW48, and it showed.

Its priority in Bahrain was therefore to rack up mileage and complete the programme it had not been able to run in Spain, and on that metric it broadly succeeded, finishing among the leading teams for total laps completed across the two tests.

Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon both sounded measured but not alarmed in their post-test assessments, and the team appeared to work through its full test plan.

The concern, however, is that running the programme and being competitive are two different things.

The sense from within and around the paddock is that the FW48 lacks the mechanical grip and stability under braking that Williams found so effectively last year, when the team achieved its best constructors’ finish in nearly a decade.

Williams is also understood to be overweight, which will be addressed through development, but it is a known deficit heading to Melbourne.

The 2026 car looks like a step back for now, and Williams’ ceiling this season may depend heavily on how quickly it can lose weight and find the missing performance.

9. Audi

For a team entering F1 as a full manufacturer, Audi’s pre-season has been a solid if unspectacular foundation.

The R26 had an inconsistent first week — early technical problems in Barcelona and reliability niggles in the first Bahrain test left the team frustrated — but the second week showed what the team is genuinely capable of, with a significant upgrade including revised sidepods among the changes introduced, and the lap count climbing meaningfully.

By the end of the programme, Audi had come close to 1000 laps across all tests.

The realistic expectation is that Audi will occupy the fringes of the midfield early in 2026, with the team essentially still carrying the infrastructure of what was Sauber while deploying an entirely new power unit and gearbox.

The early problems those components caused were concerning but not catastrophic, and the trajectory through testing was upward.

Project leader Mattia Binotto acknowledged that the list of work after the first test was the longest he had ever seen, which is a remarkable statement from a man who once ran Ferrari, but also suggested that such thorough documentation of problems is, in its way, a positive sign.

Audi knows where it stands. Now comes the task of improvement.

10. Aston Martin

There is no polite way to frame what happened to Aston Martin in Bahrain: it was a disaster.

What had already been a difficult first test week became demonstrably worse in the second, with a power unit issue keeping the AMR26 in the garage for four hours on the opening day, a battery-related fault ending Thursday running prematurely, and the final day yielding just six laps before the team ran out of spare Honda components and called it a day.

Across the six days in Bahrain, Aston Martin recorded the fewest laps of any team by a significant margin.

The optimistic framing — and there is one, just about — is that Aston Martin has the resources, the infrastructure, and one of the greatest technical minds in Formula 1’s history in Adrian Newey to address these problems.

But addressing them will take time, and the cascade effect of limited running means the team is behind its rivals both in understanding a completely new car and on the operational side of things, including energy management which is crucial in 2026.

Honda has acknowledged that the power unit is in a catch-up phase and that work is progressing at full intensity back in Sakura.

Aston may not have the slowest car on the grid, but Melbourne will be a weekend to survive rather than shine.

The season will be long, but the team will need to regain ground quickly to justify all the hype that Newey, Honda and its massive resources created during the winter.

11. Cadillac

No surprise here. Cadillac may have enjoyed a more productive pre-season than Aston Martin, but it still had the slowest car of all.

Formula 1’s 11th team will not be mistaken for a title contender in Melbourne.

But given that, 12 months ago, Cadillac did not yet have the official green light to join the grid, the story of its pre-season is worth framing in its proper context.

Across the Bahrain tests, the American squad ran reliably and consistently for a new team, completing something approaching five race distances, with both Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas completing race simulations.

There were niggles – there always are for a team running a new car under new regulations – but the team addressed them efficiently and kept the lost track time to a minimum.

The most telling number from Cadillac’s test is the gap to the midfield.

Cadillac will likely be last in Australia, but it will be competitive enough to learn and develop at a meaningful rate.

For a team that is building everything from scratch and using Ferrari power while working towards its own engine programme later in the decade, that is not nothing.

The most important work of 2026 will not happen on the track – it will happen in the factory. But the foundations in Bahrain were more solid than feared.