Worst-kept secret as pecking order explained; what silenced biggest F1 fear — Five things we learnt

The first of three pre-season tests has given us a crucial first glimpse of Formula 1 under the biggest rules shake-up in generations.

Ten of the 11 teams attended Spain’s Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya last week, and nine of them completed all three of their allocated testing days.

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That alone gives us a starting point to understand where the teams sit ahead of the season.

Conclusions are notoriously tough to draw from testing, but some early narrative arcs are beginning to emerge in the earliest days of the 2026 season.

MERCEDES ENDED TEST LOOKING BEST

Rumours had been passing through the paddock for the best part of a year that Mercedes marque was ahead of the curve with its power unit, and the team was clearly eager to move on from the ground-effect years and back to a set of regulations closer to those that defined its dominant title-winning era.

The first test in Barcelona strongly suggested those rumours were true.

The team arrived at the track having already completed 200 kilometres of private testing, more than any rival.

It was more of the same in Catalunya, where Mercedes completed comfortably more laps than anyone else, according to Racer.

Cumulative mileage by team

1. Mercedes: 502 laps (2337.8 kilometres)

2. Ferrari: 440 laps (2049.1 kilometres)

3. Haas-Ferrari: 391 laps (1820.9 kilometres)

4. Alpine-Mercedes: 349 laps (1625.3 kilometres)

5. Racing Bulls-RBPT: 319 laps (1485.6 kilometres)

6. Red Bull Racing: 304 laps (1415.7 kilometres)

7. McLaren-Mercedes: 290 laps (1350.5 kilometres)

8. Audi: 243 laps (1131.7 kilometres)

9. Cadillac-Ferrari: 164 laps (763.7 kilometres)

10. Aston Martin-Honda: 66 laps (307.4 kilometres)

11. Williams-Mercedes: 0 laps (0.0 kilometres)

It ended the week almost a full grand prix distance worth of laps ahead of next-best Ferrari. Perhaps more indicative is that it also accumulated 111 more laps than customer team Alpine, demonstrating Mercedes’s general sense of readiness beyond just clearly having a reliable motor.

Mercedes also did things its own way, completing testing on Thursday when almost every other team ran until Friday.

It’s worth remembering that Mercedes completed 2022 testing looking similarly strong and ended up in a years-long funk, so it’s important not to read too much into one set of numbers, particularly with six more days of testing to come.

But this was exactly the start the German marque would have hoped for. While other teams had a very good week in Barcelona, Mercedes clearly had the best one.

FERRARI IS SHAPING UP AS MERCEDES’S CLOSEST CHALLENGER

There’s only one other team that car really claim to have enjoyed a Mercedes-esque test, and that’s Ferrari.

The Italian team has flown under the radar. Its private shakedown was only short, and it chose the rained-out Tuesday to start testing in Barcelona.

But it completed comfortably more than 100 laps — 500 kilometres — a day, a feat matched only by Mercedes, and fell only 62 laps short in total. A lot of that can probably be accounted for by that wet Tuesday, the team’s least productive day.

The icing on the cake is the part we shouldn’t really be contemplating so early in the year: the lap times.

Ferrari ended the week with the fastest time, according to Racer, with Lewis Hamilton setting the benchmark on the final day.

Times by team

1. Ferrari: 1:16.348 (Lewis Hamilton, day 5)

2. Mercedes: 1:16.445 (George Russell, day 4)

3. McLaren-Mercedes: 1:16.594 (Lando Norris, day 5)

4. Red Bull Racing: 1:17.586 (Max Verstappen, day 5)

5. Alpine-Mercedes: 1:17.707 (Pierre Gasly, day 5)

6. Haas-Ferrari: 1:18.393 (Esteban Ocon, day 5)

7. Racing Bulls-RBPT: 1:18.451 (Arvid Lindblad, day 4)

8. Audi: 1:19.870 (Nico Hülkenberg, day 5)

9. Cadillac-Ferrari: 1:20.349 (Sergio Pérez, day 4)

10. Aston Martin-Honda: 1:20.795 (Fernando Alonso, day 5)

11. Williams-Mercedes: no time

There are so, so many caveats on this data, though.

The most obvious one is that Hamilton set his best time on Friday, whereas Russell wrapped up his test on Thursday. The track was probably faster on the final day, when the most rubber had been laid down.

Further, we don’t know at what time of day each lap was set, as a lap in the chill of the morning will be naturally slower than one in the warmer afternoon.

And of course we don’t know what run plans the drivers were on — whether they were on a long run of many sequential laps, suggesting heavier fuel, or whether they were on a lighter short run.

Most of all, however, is that no team undertook a genuine performance run.

Pole in 2025, for reference, was almost five seconds faster than Hamilton’s quickest time. These cars are expected to be slower — they have less downforce, and Barcelona is a downforce-sensitive circuit — but not that much slower. The FIA expects cars to start the year up to 2.5 seconds off last season’s pace but then improve rapidly in development.

Clearly, then, there’s a lot of room for improvement in these times, which can’t be taken as a definitive statement about the competitive order.

But they’re not completely valueless either. Both Ferrari drivers seemed upbeat about the car. Team boss Fred Vasseur seemed satisfied with these first steps.

Maybe — just maybe — Ferrari is starting this new regulatory era on the right foot.

TWO 2025 LEADERS HAVE WORK TO DO

Though neither team had a bad test, both reigning champion McLaren and Red Bull Racing ended the week looking a step behind Mercedes and Ferrari.

McLaren chose not to appear until Wednesday, and even then it took time to get going. Eventually it clocked 76 laps — half the number Mercedes completed on its first day — and Thursday was an underwhelming 48-lap day curtailed by a fuel system problem.

It ended the test in much better shape, however, with 166 laps on Friday and a competitive time, notwithstanding the unimportance of lap time at this stage of the year.

McLaren put it down to “small, niggly, little issues” that added up to considerable time in the garage. Given it’s running the Mercedes power unit that has looked bulletproof for other teams, most of those issues must be on the team side of the equation.

It’s not disastrous by any stretch. It’s just not at the level we might have expected for the reigning champion — though, depending on how the year goes, we may reflect on it simply being quiet confidence.

Red Bull Racing had a similar week worth only 14 more laps. It was ready to go on Monday, but a crash for Isack Hadjar late on Tuesday had the team hold off on its final day until Friday as it waited for spares.

The brand-new power unit — which looked reliable throughout — explains the modest lap count, but how both these teams kick on in Bahrain will give context to the gaps left behind by Barcelona

THIS ISN’T 2014 (FOR MOST TEAMS)

Red Bull Racing’s solid running did tell us one thing: fears of a repeat of 2014 were overblown.

In 2014, the first year of the turbo-hybrid power units, several teams struggled to string together more than a handful of laps in pre-season testing.

This year most power unit manufacturers looked like they were in good shape. Even Audi ended the test looking reasonable, with only Honda a question mark given Aston Martin’s very late start.

Cumulative mileage by power unit

1. Mercedes: 1141 laps (5313.6 kilometres)

2. Ferrari: 995 laps (4633.7 kilometres)

3. Red Bull Powertrains: 623 laps (2901.3 kilometres)

4. Audi: 243 laps (1131.7 kilometres)

5. Honda: 66 laps (307.4 kilometres)

To put this into context, the first day of testing in 2014 resulted in a total of 93 across the eight teams that got on track. Ferrari set a day-high 31 laps.

This year the seven teams that ran on Monday completed a stunning 631 laps between them, with Haas setting a day-high 154 laps.

Mercedes completed 309 laps over the opening four-day test in 2014. This year it racked up 502 over three days.

Red Bull Racing stuttered to just 21 laps in 2014. The least productive team in 2026 was Aston Martin, which ran for pretty much just one day and still managed three times as many laps. The fewest laps completed by a team that ran for the maximum three days was Cadillac, which completed 164 tours.

Considering that reliability was largely ironed out by the time the 2014 season started, it suggests that unreliability will be much less of a factor in 2026 that perhaps first expected.

Power unit reliability looks more even if you break it down by days on track.

Different manufacturers supply different numbers of teams. The Mercedes engine, for example, effectively had nine track days — three each for the works team, McLaren and Alpine — compared to Audi, which had just its own three days.

Average mileage by power unit per day per team

1. Mercedes: 126.8 laps (590.4 kilometres)

2. Ferrari: 110.6 laps (514.9 kilometres)

3. Red Bull Powertrains: 103.8 laps (483.6 kilometres)

4. Audi: 81.0 laps (377.2 kilometres)

5. Honda: 61.0 laps (284.1 kilometres)*

*Honda’s first five-lap day discounted given the team turned up only in the last hour of running

Mercedes still leads, but Ferrari and Red Bull are certainly in the ballpark.

And though Audi looks a step behind, it’s only roughly as far behind Red Bull as Red Bull is behind Mercedes. It’s also worth noting that Audi ended the test in much better shape than it started, with 60 per cent of its laps being set on Friday. That trajectory should count for something, even if the challenge for the German marque is still great.

CHALLENGE STILL SIGNIFICANT FOR NEWCOMERS

There are four newcomers this year, though they arrive in Formula 1 with different degrees of freshness.

Red Bull Powertrains is a new entity, but with Red Bull Racing it has an established frontrunning team.

Audi is also a new power unit operation, though the team is the former Sauber operation — a backmarker but an established one.

Cadillac is a brand-new team that received its entry barely a year ago. It’s being built from the ground up, but it’s using Ferrari motors.

Honda is not new to Formula 1, but its decision to quit the sport in 2021 and its subsequent backflip meant most of its most senior engineers are either working for other manufacturers or have been deployed to different departments of the Honda company. Its F1 engine program, therefore, is pretty much new. The Aston Martin team of course isn’t new, but there’s been considerable change there in the last two years.

Deciding which team-engine combination deserves to be cut the most slack for being new is tough, but on the evidence of the first test, it’s tough to go past Cadillac.

The car is sometimes taken for granted among all the talk of power units being the critical performance differentiator, and that’s because 10 of the 11 teams have been building F1 prototypes for years. They understand the challenge and the common pitfalls. Cadillac doesn’t have any of that institutional knowledge, and that showed in Barcelona, with 66 laps its biggest one-day total.

Audi’s challenge mustn’t be underestimated, but it ended the test in promising shape. Though the day started with issues, it racked up a strong 148 laps on the last day. The team expects to be around the back of the field this year, but if it does so with strong reliability, that’ll be a good baseline.

Aston Martin-Honda is a wildcard given Honda resolved to re-enter F1 late, and the brand has already acknowledged it’s probably left performance on the table with its internal combustion engine — and it would know given it has the benchmark performance of last year’s motor. The reorganisation of the Aston Martin team also makes this an interesting combination with potential that’s hard to pit down.

Red Bull Powertrain seems to be of least concern given both Red Bull Racing and Racing Bulls appeared to encounter no major issues, but it’ll be only when the motor is pressed for performance that we’ll know for sure how well the project is going.

WHAT’S NEXT?

The second pre-season test in Bahrain starts next Wednesday, 11 February. It’s the first of two tests in Bahrain, with another three days in the following week, a fortnight before the Australian Grand Prix.

Bahrain will be a big moment for Williams given its no-show in Barcelona, which it put down to non-specific production delays. Team principal James Vowles said the 2026 regulations are three times as complicated as any other project the team has undertaken.

It has committed not just to being ready for the first Bahrain test but to undertaking a private test — a 200-kilometre filming day — at the desert track in the days before other teams arrive.

The filming day will help to tick some of the boxes other teams ticked in Barcelona in a bid not to start Bahrain too far behind.

Williams at least knows the Mercedes power unit is reliable. If it can rack up three days — and then another three days — of significant, uninterrupted running, it might feel it got away with it before Melbourne. If it’s bogged down by issues, however, the lost time in Barcelona will be compounded through a season for which the team harboured big hopes for improvement.