The first running of the newest of new cars F1 has ever produced came Monday at Barcelona. Seven teams ran, four were missing. Williams, behind schedule after reportedly failing the crash test, won’t be doing any of the available three days of shakedown testing. Also running a little late and for similar reasons, Aston Martin might – if all goes well – get out for one, possibly two, days later in the week. Teams can run on three of the five available days and neither McLaren nor Ferrari nominated the first day.
Which left us with Mercedes, Red Bull, Racing Bulls, Audi, Haas, Alpine and Cadillac. Tuesday was largely rained out so that first day gives us our first realistic impressions of a breed of car more totally divorced from its immediate predecessors than maybe any before.
Although the Barcelona running was behind closed doors, there’s enough footage and driver feedback for us to form first impressions. Largely, they are positive. Perhaps the most impressive aspect for a totally new power unit format with a radically different split between electrical and combustion power was reliability. Between the two Mercedes-powered cars (Mercedes and Alpine), 209 laps were completed. The two Ferrari-powered cars (Haas mainly, but Cadillac also) managed 198 laps, with the all-new PU manufacturer Red Bull (powering Red Bull and Racing Bulls) getting in 195 laps. The single Audi’s running was interrupted by a technical problem after just 27 laps and was curtailed as a precaution.
Red Bull Powertrains can be deeply satisfied to have blooded its first ever proper on-track running so successfully. Not only in terms of the number of laps, but Red Bull’s new recruit, Isack Hadjar even set the best time of the day. The laptime comparison probably carries less significance than the reliability at this stage, but Hadjar himself expressed what sounded like genuine surprise at just how good it all felt.
Hadjar and Red Bull had a solid first day
Red Bull
“We were able to do a lot more laps than expected,” he said. “It all went pretty smooth. The car itself feels a bit more predictable than last year, more simple, easy to play around with. We have more options on the PU side and I was already starting to play about with it. It was a really decent PU for first day and the driving doesn’t really feel too different from before.”
Hadjar was in the minority on that latter point, though. “These cars are massively different,” said Cadillac’s Sergio Perez. “It still early days but this the biggest reg change in my career and it’s a real challenge.” Team-mate Valtteri Bottas was in broad agreement, saying, “There’s a big difference; they handle different, there’s less load in high-speed corners but so much more torque out of the corners. Then you have to manage the battery. It’s a big learning curve.”
“It’s very different to drive,” said Franco Colapinto after trying the Alpine-Mercedes. “It’s still a race car at the end of day but the technique, energy management, thinner tyres, the way that you set it up; these are all things still to learn.”
Colapinto’s comments were echoed by Audi’s Gabriel Bortoleto. “Yeah, you have to adapt your driving. But it’s not a different world. It’s quite manageable.”
George Russell spent the morning spectating trackside before taking over the Mercedes from Kimi Antonelli in the afternoon and he was deeply impressed with how the cars look. “That’s the quickest I’ve ever seen an F1 car pass in Barcelona. They are so fast down the straight… I think the racing will be more exciting for the fans and I don’t think they’ll see the negatives we’re feeling in the car with the recharge.”
Russell was impressed in the car too. “It is different,” he said, “but once you wrap your head around it, it feels quite intuitive. Also you can really feel the car is smaller and how much lighter it is. I was a fan of how the big cars looked when they came out in 2017 but having driven them for a while, they were too big.”
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Although getting the cars down to the reduced weight limit (770kg, 30kg lighter than before) while still getting through the crash tests is clearly a big challenge, given the evident difficulties of Williams and Aston Martin, the sheer engineering power of all the teams to deliver such radically different cars which run so reliably on their first day is very clear. “It’s not going to be like in 2014,” says Russell, “when half the grid was breaking down and having issues. F1 has evolved so much since then and the level of the teams is so high.”
“Yes, it was important to see that we could keep the car running on track,” said Merc’s trackside engineering chief Andrew Shovlin. “There’s a lot of complexity not just in the new chassis and power units but also in fuel development and electronics. The drivers both reported the car actually felt better on track than in the simulator. In terms of driveability, I think we’re in a pretty good place.”
This Barcelona running is very much a debugging exercise, a building up of knowledge, and we’re unlikely to see any accurate performance indicators. Even data from the Bahrain tests will be much more provisional in its significance, so new is everything. “It will only be in Melbourne we’ll get a real feel for who is on top,” says Russell. But as beginnings of new eras go, this was way more promising than what even the teams were expecting.
