Gary Anderson’s verdict on each F1 team’s test form

Now that Formula 1 pre-season test has finished, it’s down to who has the most up their sleeve to improve the car over the next week and a half based on what they have learned so far.

Testing can leave you even more confused and uncertain than you were before it started, but all we can do is look at what happened, try to read through the grey mist and give our best predictions from that.

We know it’s very incomplete data, but you can only take what every team did and use it to build a picture of the competitive order.

First of all, I am going to list the teams in the order of their fastest outright lap time and noting the tyre it was set on, and give a few notes on how satisfied – or not – I think each one should be with its weekend’s work.

1 Red Bull – Ran like clockwork

1m28.960s, C4 tyre, day three afternoon

Red Bull brought quite a few different parts to test and was able to run through the programme without any problems. Basically, the car and the Honda power unit ran like clockwork, unlike some others.

At the start of the test, I thought Red Bull had brought its early-2020 handling gremlins into the start of 2021, but by the afternoon of day one in Max Verstappen’s hands the car looked strong and, in reality, the team never looked back.

You could see Verstappen’s confidence brimming over when he was pushing for a lap time and it was a case of ‘anything you can do, he could do better’ whenever anyone else went fast.

For Sergio Perez, it was a slightly different story. He looked happy enough with the car but never really got a shot at a qualifying sim when the track was in a decent condition. Even so, 1.227s slower than Verstappen in the headline times is a big gap to make up.

2 AlphaTauri – Should be full of confidence

1m29.053s, C5 tyre, day three afternoon

The AlphaTauri looks well balanced and driver friendly. When you have a rookie joining you – as AlphaTauri has with Yuki Tsunoda – that’s just what you need.

I never really saw anything untoward over the test and when Tsunoda was required to wring the car’s neck, he was certainly able to do so lap after lap.

Pierre Gasly doesn’t need that sort of running, so he would have been focusing on higher fuel work and tyre evaluation. When he was on track, he was never far away from the top of the timesheets so I think AlphaTauri will go into this season full of confidence.

3 Ferrari – Not ‘together’ yet

1m29.614s, C4 tyre, day three afternoon

The car doesn’t look like an ‘all together’ package. By that I mean it looks like it is made up of bits from other cars that don’t quite work together. Until the last run, Carlos Sainz Jr didn’t really look at home in it.

It looks a bit like the Mercedes in that it doesn’t seem to have a constant balance and every corner is a new experience.

Charles Leclerc looks more at home, but you would expect that as it’s the start of his third season with Ferrari.

I don’t think he had a low fuel run as he ended up over eight-tenths behind Sainz overall. However, we all know when push comes to shove Leclerc will drag the best possible time out of the car.

4 Alfa Romeo – Low-fuel glory run

1m29.766s, C5 tyre, day three afternoon

What the car looked like on the track didn’t represent the lap time.

I’m pretty sure the Alfa was on low fuel to do that lap time, as I’m sure AlphaTauri was, but even so it’s great to see Kimi Raikkonen hasn’t lost the will to give it a fling when the opportunity arises.

5 Mercedes – Not what we’re used to seeing

1m30.025s, C5 tyre, day three afternoon

Mercedes lost a lot of run time, especially on day one, but the car never really looked like it had the balance or grip of last year’s W11. And we never really saw any updates introduced over these three days of testing.

Yes, I’m sure Mercedes was running probably the highest fuel load of anyone, but even so a stable well balanced car normally looks pretty good whatever the fuel load and that’s definitely not what we saw.

Lewis Hamilton had a couple of spins and it’s quite a long time since we have said that. And when Lewis has a bad day, it usually escalates into a nightmare.

Valtteri Bottas struggled more with reliability, but when on track he didn’t look any more at home. It just didn’t look like either driver had any confidence.

6 Williams – A professional start

1m30.117s, C5 tyre, day three afternoon

It went about its business in a professional manner and put in lots of laps. The car doesn’t look bad, but again it might be just that bit short of grip.

The Williams seems to give the drivers confidence, which is all they can ask for, although as George Russell explained it is apparently wind-sensitive.

It follows the Alpine body philosophy with a bulbous shape, but a bit further down. This will let the airflow from the radiators get out of the back of the body without compromising the aggressiveness of the sidepod undercut and the ‘Coke bottle’ shaped section.

7 McLaren – Driver-friendly

1m30.144s, C4 tyre, day three afternoon

From the start of testing, the car looked driver very friendly. When the drivers pushed, the car responded and there were very few mistakes.

That normally shows the package gives the drivers the confidence they need to wring its neck when the time comes to do it.

Some of the other teams questioned McLaren’s interpretation of the diffuser strakes, which have been shortened by 5cm this year. Looking at the regulations, I think it’s clearly legal but time will tell.

Daniel Ricciardo has fitted in well and I think the team will welcome his commitment and also his humour. A good balance of both is very good for motivation and he and Norris will be a strong pairing.

8 Alpine – Alonso looks good, but that airbox…

1m30.318s, C4 tyre, day three afternoon

The car definitely looks different with its bulbous airbox and it’s going to have to be quick before it gets too many compliments!

Other than that it increases the height of the centre of gravity, I agree with what the team has done in moving some of the stuff that normally lives in the sidepods up a bit to allow them to open up the sidepod undercut and Coke bottle area.

You don’t often get a benefit for nothing, so I suppose it was decided to be worth that compromise.

As for Fernando Alonso, it was like he had never been away. Esteban Ocon has someone to be measured against, so he can’t afford too many off days.

9 Aston Martin – Poor reliability got in the way

1m30.460s, C4 tyre, day two afternoon

It was a tough test with lots of reliability problems, mainly for Sebastian Vettel.

On the track, the car looked OK-ish, if a bit like the Mercedes where it just didn’t have the grip to push harder. If the drivers did, one end or the other would give up.

I don’t think Aston Martin is this bad and it didn’t really get a shot at a low or even medium fuel load qualifying run.

But reliability is part of the game and it needs to focus on this before anything else.

Hopefully with a twiddle of a few nuts and bolts, it can find some performance.

10 Haas – Just has to stay out of trouble

1m31.531s, C4 tyre, day three afternoon

Haas went about its business in a very professional way.

Team principal Guenther Steiner is happy to say the team is not doing any developments and hasn’t bothered spending the development tokens. But it did have some alterations under the nose by adding some parts to mimic as best possible the cape section. But they were just glue-on bits, so nothing too exciting.

Both of its drivers did a very professional job, with maximum running and minimal mistakes.

For this season, all they can do is keep out of trouble and, if possible, benefit from others making mistakes.

CONVERTED TIMES

Above I have looked only at the actual lap time set, but we can apply a few adjustments to get a more accurate picture.

The table below consists of each team’s fastest lap time converted to what it would have been on the C4 tyre. Then, based on past pre-season tests, I apply my suspected fuel loads to adjust so every car is on 10kg.

The last column is that lap time expressed as a percentage deficit to the fastest.

We can now rearrange this order in adjusted pace order. I have also added a percentage deficit from last year’s Bahrain Grand Prix weekend to give a comparison of how has improved or got worse.

I don’t believe that Mercedes will be that far behind Red Bull in qualifying for the Bahrain Grand Prix and I do believe the work Mercedes does between now and then will close the gap. But on track, the car didn’t have the exceptional poise that Mercedes usually shows, so something somewhere is not quite working as planned.

Each team will have generated a very long job sheet from the test and it’s now about prioritising those problems and instigating the required fixes. Some will be simple procedures, some will be critical reliability problems and some will be performance related. It’s about how you go about those fixes that will influence the end result come race day in Bahrain.