F1 testing disasters: Renault's terrible turbo & Honda's horror show
The F1 pre-season test offers new hope to those further down the grid – but sometimes, as history has shown, it all goes wrong from the off
Champion teams and drivers can still run aground in pre-season testing
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The first rays of sunshine breaking over the Catalunyan mountains – or more recently the Bahraini desert – represent the perfect metaphor for all the hopes and dreams of every F1 team as each season begins.
That unblemished promise of a new dawn is what sustains squads and their weary staff to that first pre-season test session, battle-scarred from the previous year and worn down by the push to finish the latest car over the off-season.
Will they have a winner on their hands, or is it a dud? Does glory, mid-table mediocrity or back-of-the-grid humiliation beckon?
There have been famous triumphs, like the incredible Brawn 001 or the Mercedes W05, but there have also been technological tragedies – cars so bad you wonder why the team even bothered showing up.
Describing the anguish in full excruciating detail, we look back on F1’s biggest testing disasters.
1995: Mansell too big for the McLaren
Larger-than-life Mansell was too big for ’95 McLaren
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It was the ‘big story’ of 1995. While Michael Schumacher had established himself as the pre-eminent force by tangling his way to victory over Damon Hill in 1994, an old heavyweight was throwing his hat back into the ring – full-time at least.
By now slightly bored of his American IndyCar adventure – which had yielded the title at first attempt in 1993 – Nigel Mansell had made several substitute appearances in 1994 for Williams in place of the late Ayrton Senna, but the Grove team opted for David Coulthard as Hill’s full-time team-mate for 1995.
What resulted was very much a marriage of inconvenience – larger than life, melodramatic Mansell instead signed for Ron Dennis’s ice cool, technology-driven McLaren International.
Many thought it was never going to work, and were proved true from the off when it was found he was too large to fit in Woking’s 1995 car, the MP4-10.
“I did the seat fitting and then we did the pre-season testing with him [Mansell],” former McLaren mechanic John Morgan told The Race.
“Johnny [Ostrowski, a fellow mechanic] and I did the driver seat fitting. Just speaking to other mechanics [we knew] Mansell was always tight in the car, but this time he was properly wedged in the thing.”
Once he was on the track, Mansell found himself unable to drive properly due to the physical restrictions. As a result the former world champion had to sit out the first two races of 1995 while McLaren made him a bigger chassis.
When he did return with the super-sized Macca, its hopeless performance left him dispirited – Mansell turned his back on F1 for good after completing just two races for McLaren.
2014: Red Bull-Renault
Red Bull’s 2014 car had a dud of a Renault engine
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From 2010 to 2013 the Red Bull-Renault package has been the one to beat, with Sebastian Vettel and co. hoovering up eight titles over that period.
In 2014 though, when the new hybrid turbo engines were introduced, it all fell apart. While the chassis appeared sound, Renault’s new ‘Energy F1’ power unit could barely run without blowing up – never mind power the car to decent lap times.
While most of other Mercedes and Ferrari-powered teams were straight out at 9am in Jerez, the new Red Bull didn’t emerge till 4.45pm for a sheepish installation lap form Vettel. The next day he managed… 11 laps.
As Merc’s Nico Rosberg completed 1750 miles across the three pre-season tests, Vettel didn’t even make four figures.
Various grumblings suggested finger-pointing in various directions, with some suggesting genius designer Adrian Newey had gone too far with his shrink-wrapped design, it was plain that the engine wasn’t much cop.
“It’s just a bloody difficult time because it’s a difficult car to work on,” said Vettel. “Right now it’s impossible to have any expectations.”
What few would have guessed at the time was that this spelt the end for the German and Red Bull, one of F1’s most successful partnerships.
While a fresh-faced Daniel Ricciardo would become the team’s new darling by taking three wins in his first season at Milton Keynes – once the recalcitrant engine had been semi-sorted – Vettel would remain winless all year, heading to Ferrari for 2015.
2015: McLaren-Honda
Honda returned to F1 in 2015 with a slow – and unreliable – start
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If Red Bull-Renault thought it had things bad in 2014, it paled in comparison to McLaren’s 2015 annus horribilis.
Harking back to the heady days of Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost’s domination in the McLaren-Hondas of the late 1980s and early ’90s, the two brands announced they would link up once again from 2015, with the Japanese marque building a new hybrid-turbo for the Woking team.
Furthermore, world champion driver Jenson Button would be joined by another in the form of Fernando Alonso, all kissed-and-made-up with McLaren following his acrimonious 2007 exit.
And that’s where the good news stopped. The Honda RA615H engine strapped into the back of McLaren MP4-30 was woefully underpowered – but that was when it could even make it out of the pits.
The car managed just 12 laps across its first two days of testing in Jerez. Things didn’t improved much from thereon in, setting the tone for the entire year – and following seasons – with an unreliable car which at times had to run 200bhp down to stop it from blowing up.
Across the 2015 season both Button and Alonso were on average 2.7sec off the pace in qualifying, almost always going out in Q1.
It would take a split in the partnership, with McLaren going to Renault and then Mercedes, while Honda teamed up with Red Bull, for both parties to recover former glories.
2019: Williams turns up late for its own test
2019 Williams was late to the party
“Embarrassing”. That’s how team boss Claire Williams described her team’s failure to turn up on time for the 2019 F1 pre-season test at Barcelona – the only squad on the grid to do so.
What caused the tardy arrival was a delay in the production of parts – the car literally wasn’t finished – causing the historic team to miss the first two and a half days of running.
“This is not a situation we anticipated,” Claire Williams said at the time. “It’s not a situation we ever wanted to find ourselves in.
“We’re not just disappointed but it’s embarrassing not bringing a race car to a circuit when everyone else has managed to do that.
“Particularly for a team like ours that has managed to deliver a race car to testing for the past 40-odd years. So, we can only apologise.”
The disaster is depicted in skin-crawling detail in the second series of Netflix: Drive to Survive, when Claire gives her technical director Paddy Lowe a death stare worth a thousand words – while front wings et al are unloaded from a car boot.
2022: Mercedes bounces down the grid
Mercedes 2022 car was one of its worst
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2022 was for many supposed to be the season when Lewis Hamilton reclaimed his drivers’ title after the 2021 Abu Dhabi debacle – but his unruly Mercedes W13 had other ideas.
The new ground effect aerodynamics era meant many teams were dealing with the unfortunate ‘porpoising’ phenomenon, resulting in cars bouncing at high speed.
Few teams suffered worse than Mercedes, and it soon became clear that the Silver Arrows team was off the pace.
While Ferrari and Red Bull appeared to be the new pace setters, Hamilton said there was no way Mercedes could challenge for race victories.
He was proved right, ultimately enduring the first winless season of his F1 career.
At the end of the season, Wolff declared he would “put these cars in the reception at Brackley and in Brixworth to remind us every single day how difficult it can be”.