The 2018 Formula 1 World Championship kicks off next weekend in Melbourne and after a winter of designing and building the fastest cars on the planet, the F1 teams are all geared up for another season on the roller coaster. Last week, I went to the pre-season testing session in Barcelona to try and judge just what the pecking order is as we head down under.Last year, Ferrari looked like they were a real match for the Mercedes in pre-season testing and when we got to Melbourne, that certainly proved to be the case.
This year, however, the Brackley squad seems to have taken another good step forward. Visually the car is a logical update on their championship winner from 2017 but it has obviously had all the right changes to make it much more user friendly. Watching Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas out on track, they were able to metronomically hit the same line lap after lap with remarkable consistency. And speed.Mercedes have been very smart about not showing their hand in testing with the faster tyres but make no mistake, a quick look at the race runs shows very clearly that they’re a step ahead of the pack.
I reckon that gap is about 4 tenths of a second at the moment. For the sake of Formula 1 and the show, I really hope that Bottas can take the fight to Lewis this year!
Watching the Ferrari out on track, it’s clearly a fast car. Last year in pre-season testing, it looked like an easier car to drive than the Mercedes but this time around, every time the drivers try and lean on it a bit more and extract some more speed, it just doesn’t seem to be there.The Red Bull looks like they’ve carried on their progression from the end of last year, where their chassis was working brilliantly. It’s really very hard to fault the car out on track in the slow and medium speed corners and the braking stability looked excellent.
Red Bull’s weakness could still be in the power department. Renault seem to have made good progress on the reliability front, with some good testing mileage being banked by Red Bull and the works Renault team. I hope that this means they can turn up the power a bit more in Qualifying but insiders still reckon they are going to be about forty horsepower down on the Mercedes.On the whole, I would say that the two teams are very evenly matched. Conveniently, they even did race simulations at similar times of the day which helped us peg the gap between them as being fairly even. They will need a big step forward with updates to catch Mercedes though.
McLaren has been the biggest talking point of the pre-season tests. All through the winter, F1 fans around the world were praying that the switch to Renault power will allow Fernando Alonso and McLaren to be fighting up at the sharp end once again.McLaren had a catalogue of reliability woes and when the car was running, the team chose a strategy of testing with softer tyres than anyone else for most of the time, which made it hard to draw any conclusions as to their true pace.
Finally however, on the last couple of days, we saw some long runs from Stoffel Vandoorne and some decent medium length and short runs from Fernando Alonso which confirmed that on pace, Mclaren certainly have the potential to be the fourth best team.The works Renault team looks like a proper factory team for the first time in years. The have two hotshots in the cockpit, solid funding and good people on board. The car looks good and balanced out on track and apart from a gearbox glitch on the final day, they generally had very good reliability.
It’s been a very impressive turnaround in the last eighteen months – who can forget the woeful qualifying in Baku 2016 where the yellow cars were on the back row of the grid!Renault look like they’re at the sharp end of the battle for fourth with Mclaren, and about half a second behind Ferrari and Red Bull. That’s a good starting point for a team rebuilding and I’m really interested to see how they progress in this battle against Mclaren.Haas F1 also showed some strong form while Williams and Force India look like they haven’t yet unlocked the full potential of their new 2018 cars.All the speculation will stop in a few days time when we get to Melbourne. Come Qualifying on Saturday afternoon, the answers will be there in black and white on the timing sheets!
The writer drove for Hispania Racing in 2010 and for the Lotus F1 team in 2011.