Standing atop one of the paddock buildings at the Bahrain International Circuit overlooking the second sector, a figure in Formula One team gear sidled up alongside me.
“What are you making of all this, then?” he said.
It was a driver who, for the same reason as me, had come onto the roof to gain a better vantage point to watch the cars circle the track as the sun set on the second day of preseason testing in 2024.
By this point, all the teams had completed at least three race distances with their new cars, giving them an initial understanding of how their 2024 challengers — carrying the hopes of the entire workforce and millions of fans around the world — were performing.
Working out how they compared to everyone else? That was harder to figure out.
Twelve months ago, Red Bull was the big on-track story. Following its 2023 season, the most dominant in F1 history, it looked to have taken another advantageous step with its car design. The driver agreed with me, raising his eyebrows.
“It’s so hard to know otherwise,” he said. “Everyone seems similar to last year. Except for Alpine, they’ve dropped back.”
He was right. Red Bull dominated the start of the year, winning the season opener in Bahrain by over 20 seconds, and Alpine slid back — only for both teams’ fortunes to change as the season wore on.
It was a good lesson in how the ‘smoke and mirrors’ of preseason testing can be so hard to decipher. When preseason testing begins on Wednesday in Bahrain, lap times will tell only half-truths — real performance will remain deliberately obscured behind carefully choreographed runs and strategic misinformation. While the teams themselves will know how their own cars are performing, the rewards of months of hard work and development, how that compares to their rivals is another matter.
Entering what many anticipate to be one of the closest F1 seasons ever, making sense of the three days of preseason running in Bahrain could be especially difficult.
“It is a little bit like ‘put the tail on the donkey,’ because you’re guessing,” said James Vowles, Williams’ team principal. “I think this year, the field is going to be the closest it has been certainly since I’ve been in the sport.”
2025 will be the final year of F1’s current car design rules ahead of next year’s overhaul, which will combine a major shift in technical regulations with the introduction of new power units that run on fully sustainable fuels. In any major rule change, there are typically one or sometimes two teams (in 2022, Red Bull and Ferrari; in 2014, Mercedes) that steal a march on the field, blowing apart the order for a few years before performance converges as the regulations mature and the teams at the top innovate with diminishing returns.
F1 ended 2024 with incredibly fine margins separating the field as design breakthroughs became harder to find for the front-runners, best proved by Red Bull’s mid-season struggles. In the first qualifying session for the season finale in Abu Dhabi, all 20 cars were covered by eight-tenths of a second, while less than half a second separated first from the knockout bubble in 15th. (By contrast, the gap between P1 and P15 in Q1 of the first GP was .646s.) The leading quartet of McLaren, Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes had an advantage over the ‘midfield’, but all the performance gaps had dropped.
The fine margins made the winter all the more important for teams to try to gain every thousandth of a second possible with their new car designs. If an already tight field were to converge, the battles throughout could be intense.
“Don’t get me excited!” said Alpine’s Pierre Gasly about the prospect of 0.1 seconds separating a driver from Q1 and Q3. “I want us to be the best of the midfield and challenge the top four on some occasions, like I’ve done at the end of last year. I really hope it’s going to be possible.” He admitted to not wanting to be left “disappointed” if the gaps grow larger this year.
The fine margins separating teams also explain why they often attempt to give away as little information as possible during the preseason that their rivals could use as an advantage. At The O2 last week, not a single team presented their 2025 F1 car — most had a 2024 show car model but in this year’s livery instead. Not only does it remove the pressure to get all the new parts ready for the updated car, but it also stops rivals from spotting any design elements early that could give them a chance to play catch-up.
The same has been true even through more regular launch seasons when teams present their cars themselves. In 2022, Mercedes released a series of renders of its new car as part of its unveiling. The actual car, complete with its radical slim sidepod design that dramatically shrank a crucial bodywork section, looked quite a bit different. The design concept proved to be a failure, eventually forcing the team to take a different direction in the middle of 2023.
The renders Mercedes initially released of the W13 (L) versus what hit the track for testing (R) (via Mercedes, Hasan Bratic/DeFodi Images via Getty Images)
By the time the cars exit the pit lane for the start of testing in Bahrain, with TV cameras and photographers tracking every movement, there is nowhere left to hide. But it is still possible for teams to try to mask their pace by using different engine modes to slow themselves down, adding extra fuel to make the car heavier, or instructing drivers to back off at certain points of the track.
It often means the timesheets can be deceptive. Ferrari set the quickest and second-quickest times in testing last year, but few in the paddock believed anyone would beat Red Bull, a prediction that proved true come the race one week later when Max Verstappen won the Bahrain GP by 22 seconds.
“When you’re just playing with 10 kilos of fuel, that’s about three-tenths (of a second), or power unit modes that can be up to a second, you can mask where you are so evidently that the gap in the field is going to be less than that,” said Vowles.
“I don’t think anyone walked away from Bahrain (testing) with confidence as to where they really ranked. And that’s great: that’s what we want in the sport. I can’t predict who is going to win the championship or how the midfield will shake out.”
Although the teams can at least build a rough pecking order of how things might shape up for the opening race through data analysis or, like the driver on the rooftop, simply watching how the cars are handling out on the track, there will always be a degree of uncertainty.
“I think by day three, we’re going to be able to give a sensible picture, hopefully, of where everyone is,” said Esteban Ocon, who has joined Haas for 2025. “You always doubt; you’re never 100 percent sure. But I reckon it’s going to be a little bit more clear from there.”
As difficult as it is for drivers and teams to accurately know how their rivals are faring through testing, they can quickly suss out what their own cars are doing.
“Within five laps, you know if you’re in for a good season or not,” said George Russell, whose Mercedes team has failed to top winter testing since 2020, also the last year it won a drivers’ title. “We’ve known within the first five laps of the last couple of years that we wouldn’t be fighting for the championship, or at least we knew we wouldn’t be fighting at the beginning of the season.”
Mercedes has struggled for consistency under these technical regulations, causing it to drop to fourth in the championship last year. “Every year, we’ve uncovered a problem, we’ve solved it, and it’s created a new one,” Russell explained. For 2025, he felt Mercedes’ simulator preparations had been more disciplined than ever to “ensure we’re not going to fall into a new trap.” Whether or not it’s enough against the competition is another matter.
“We’ve seen it with many other teams: They bring an upgrade, and it doesn’t work,” Russell said. “So there are never guarantees.”
It is for that reason most F1 drivers tend to focus on doing the best job they possibly can with the car at their disposal. Verstappen maintained that approach through last year amid Red Bull’s dip in form, knowing the best chance to get an improved car — one with a wider operating window of conditions for peak performance — would come through the winter. Placing energy elsewhere is seen as a waste of time.
“Each team, especially the midfield teams, they’re improving so much that you think you’ve done a really good step, and you have, but other midfield teams have done it as well if not even more,” said Williams driver Alex Albon.
Alex Albon locks up under braking during day one of F1 Testing at Bahrain International Circuit on February 21, 2024 (Clive Mason/Getty Images)
“The one thing that you can tell from Bahrain testing, within the first 15 to 20 laps of driving, is if the car is feeling like it’s gone in the right direction or not. So there’s a lot of that going on. Then it’s trying to rebalance the car and get it into a good window for Melbourne.”
Only when qualifying in Australia on March 15 will the true competitive picture become clear, giving an indication of which team may have stepped forward or gained an edge through the winter. Even then, the particular demands of that track may not be indicative of the entire season, meaning that, too, has to be taken with some caution.
“When you look at last year, I don’t think there are really any trends of where cars go well and when they perform poorly,” Russell said. “I think whoever wins in Melbourne, or even if a team dominates, I don’t think that necessarily means they’ll go on to dominate the season.
“If they win the opening four races, that’s a better indicator.”
Top photo of Max Verstappen: Clive Mason/Getty Images
