After the slightly odd ‘test that wasn’t a test’ in Barcelona, we have finally had our first proper look at the new 2026 cars in Bahrain as the teams have all unveiled their final liveries and decamped to the desert for six proper days of testing. Testing, especially when it’s so early in a rules cycle, is very hard to read and draw any conclusions from but after several years in this game and knowing the characters involved, you start to understand how to read between the lines and get at least some sense of how things are going.

As I said in my last column, Mercedes and McLaren will start this season as the favourites in my book. The power unit has proven to be reliable and robust straight off the bat. With four teams collecting good data, and all of them fielding at least one experienced race-winning driver, they should be able to learn and improve the software side of things at a very high rate. McLaren will take a lot of confidence from recent years where its design and development process at home translated to on-track performance, while Mercedes will be hoping that a step away from the ground-effect cars and back to the higher rake aero cars will help the team unlock the potential it never quite managed in the past four seasons.

“They’re using lower gears than in previous years to keep the revs up”

Mercedes’ Toto Wolff was very complimentary of the Red Bull powertrain in Bahrain. And while I suspect that amid the compression ratio argument there is a bit of political gamesmanship by declaring it the ‘best engine’, there is no doubt that RBPT’s technical director Ben Hodgkinson and his team have delivered an impressive piece of work. Let’s bear in mind that they had to build up a whole engine company and then produce a power unit in five years, so it’s a much bigger task than someone like Mercedes HPP or Ferrari or even Audi producing an engine. Five years ago, RBPT literally had a few desks in a Portakabin as it began the recruitment drive, so to have an engine that bashed out 136 laps for Max Verstappen on the first day of hot running in Bahrain is quite incredible.

Williams and Aston Martin being late to the first test would have set them on the back foot in the short term but they had ample time in Bahrain across the six days to make up for that lost time, so it can’t really be an excuse. The Aston chassis is certainly the most eye catching as one would expect from Adrian Newey, but ultimately the package combined with Honda will have to deliver on the timesheets in order to satisfy Lawrence Stroll’s desire to be a top team.

Cadillac has been impressive in my opinion. The scale of creating a whole new F1 team is a mammoth job these days and they have been very respectable. I remember throughout 2024 we had most of the other team bosses saying “we don’t want them in F1 because they will be so slow and not even get to the 107% time” while I argued that having more teams on the grid was good for the sport. Now I think it’s fair to say that while they won’t be scoring points yet, they will be noticeable and solid, which is all they can ask for to get the ball rolling.