With Formula 1's season-opening Australian Grand Prix right around the corner, there’s nowhere to hide for any driver, team or organisation in trouble.
Three days of pre-season testing don't tell us everything about the 2025 pecking order; we'll only know properly when the lights go out in Melbourne. But you can tell who is already feeling the heat.
And while the likes of McLaren can be quietly confident, there are a few others who already look to be in trouble before the first race of the season.
Red Bull
Of 2024's frontrunning quartet it's Red Bull that appears to be in the most trouble.
There doesn't appear to be a fundamental design flaw but getting the RB21 into the right working window is still proving to be a puzzle, with both Max Verstappen and Liam Lawson visibly struggling with the car.
That's particularly troublesome for Lawson, who is trying to do what no team-mate of Verstappen has done for the last six years: consistently get close to Verstappen's level. Don't forget, Lawson has never even started an F1 season before.
It's not going to be an easy senior team debut for Lawson but there were at least some tentative signs in Bahrain that he might be up to the job.
There's promise of a decent pipeline of upgrades for the RB21 too but they'll only come once the team properly understands where it's lacking.
By Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache's own admission, the team has not made the progress over the winter it would have liked to.
"I am not as happy as I could be because the car did not respond how we wanted at times, but it is going in the right direction, just maybe the magnitude of the direction was not as big as we expected, and it's something we need to work on for the first race and future development," Wache said after Bahrain.
Despite first appearances of very few differences, Red Bull insists the 2024 to 2025 car changes are actually numerous. And those changes mean Red Bull has started a lengthy learning process rather than simply picking up where it left things last year.
The changes have delivered some positive signs as there's now a flatter set-up window with less of the troublesome peakiness of its predecessor. So there are hints of untapped potential.
Also don't forget there's the mid-season flexi wing clampdown coming for the Spanish GP in June, which Red Bull hopes will bring things further back in its favour.
But given its chief 2024 rival McLaren looks so strong, that could mean some early damage is dealt to both Verstappen's title defence and the team's hopes of regaining the constructors' title it lost last year.
It might be a case of damage limitation in the early races until Red Bull solves the mystery of its RB21.
Aston Martin
The 2026 season is where Aston Martin is targeting a great leap forward with its emerging F1 superteam but it would have hoped to make more progress than it appears to have made heading into 2025.
After testing Fernando Alonso said "things look similar to Abu Dhabi last year".
That's worrying because even though the team was fifth in the 2024 constructors’ championship, well clear of the rest of the midfield, in the final phase of the season it had slipped to regularly having the seventh-, eighth- or sometimes ninth-quickest car.
That's not where a team with the resources or ambitions of Aston Martin should be even if it won't get the full benefit of its new windtunnel and technology campus until 2026.
One of the big objectives for the AMR25 was making the car more benign - ie more predictable for drivers Alonso and Lance Stroll.
The initial feedback was good, though by the end of the test The Race's trackside team were witnessing more and more rear instability on entry and corrective action from the drivers.
Alonso shrugged this off as the Bahrain track conditions simply moving the car out of the "sweet spot". If he's right then Aston Martin has at least made progress in a key area.
It's key not least because the unpredictability of last year's car was a major factor in Stroll going point-less for the final 11 races.
The problem is his illness on Friday in Bahrain meant Stroll completed fewer laps than any other driver during the test.
A lack of testing didn't stop Stroll from performing well in early 2023 when an injury from a cycling accident ruled him out of testing, but back then Aston Martin had a top-four car - which the 2025 car doesn't look anywhere near being.
Our team in Bahrain didn't witness the quiet confidence of early 2023 at Aston Martin, instead it simply looks to be a continuation of its late-2024 frustration for now.
The team can at least be buoyed by Adrian Newey's arrival earlier this month, but ideally all of his focus should be on 2026, not salvaging Aston Martin's 2025.
It won't have the benefit of Enrico Cardile's knowledge either after Ferrari's court case victory means Cardile definitely can't get to work any earlier than when his gardening leave expires in July.
There's still plenty of excitement about Aston Martin's huge 2026 potential but for now it faces a fight to have a respectable 2025.
Jack Doohan
Alpine is nowhere near the omni-shambles of this time last year when it had an overweight and slow car that was so poor it led to both its technical director and head of aerodynamics resigning before the season opener.
In fact, Alpine looks to be in very good shape, having built on the progress of its impressive recovery last year.
There's little to choose between Alpine and Williams as the standout midfield team after testing, so it's far from in trouble - but one of its drivers certainly is.
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Jack Doohan's had the spotlight on him ever since Alpine brought in Franco Colapinto as a reserve driver in January, with even Williams saying this was Colapinto's best chance of securing a race seat.
Doohan had a perfectly respectable test. Much like his surprise Abu Dhabi debut last year, it was solid if unspectacular.
He did so against the backdrop of consistent questioning about his future and whether he feels under threat given the rumours that he only has a few races to prove he deserves to keep his seat for the full season.
Team boss Oliver Oakes is proud of how "punchy" Doohan has been in response to the questions and said he feels for his driver because the media "wants the clickbait" when Doohan deserves some space to perform.
The problem is it's Alpine's own actions and rhetoric that have created that noise. And even Oakes acknowledges that this is a meritocracy, and that starting the season with Pierre Gasly and Doohan doesn't mean Alpine will finish the season with that line-up.
No other driver on the grid is in as much immediate trouble as Doohan is with his F1 career hanging in the balance before it's properly begun.
Sauber
Sauber had a modest revival in the closing stages of 2024, avoiding a point-less campaign thanks to Zhou Guanyu's eighth place in Qatar and even getting a car into Q3 in the Abu Dhabi finale.
But 2025 pre-season testing has extinguished any optimism that created.
The Sauber C45 looked a handful on track from the off in testing. While things did improve rapidly across the first day as work was done to tweak the set-up, eliminating the worst of the car's vices, that only took the edge of its trickiness.
Laptimes don't mean a huge amount in testing, but when you have the slowest overall laptime of the 10 cars, are at the back on long-run pace, and your car looks like the biggest handful on track, you are in trouble. And our F1 team couldn't find any outfit in the paddock that didn't regard Sauber as being at the back.
Technical director James Key said it was a "productive test", describing the car as having decent, consistent performance - adding "we will look to keep moving forward".
Given that inevitably that's an upbeat appraisal, consistent is about the most generous thing you can say about the car.
The trouble is, it consistently looked a handful. While it wasn't at Alpine 2024 pre-season levels, the car never looked properly planted. And while Nico Hulkenberg used his vast experience to make the most of it, rookie Gabriel Bortoleto found the car a challenge. That's not a criticism of him, as he needs to explore the limits, but this is hardly a dream car for a rookie.
Judged by our team watching from trackside, the Sauber looks to be running too stiff - even by the standards of current F1 cars. That suggests the car cannot be run more compliantly mechanically, given doing so would surely make it easier to drive.
Edd Straw pressed Hulkenberg on the trickiness of the car at the end of the test in Bahrain. The veteran used all of his experience to dodge the questions, but it's fair to say he hardly shot down the notion that Sauber was struggling.
Edd and Hulkenberg exchange
Edd Straw: The car looked quite hard work out there during testing.
Nico Hulkenberg: What? Easy. Easy. Sandbagging.
ES: It looked stiff?
NH: It was stiff? Tell the engineers that now. You said that.
ES: What have you been telling the engineers?
NH: Maybe I told them it's stiff too!
It was a good-natured exchange, one of several, but suffice to say Sauber has some significant work to do. And Hulkenberg did concede that the baseline of the car was "not amazing" and Sauber has "certain struggles".
It is still early days and there's every possibility Sauber will work out how to get the best out of the car between now and Australia. While it's at the back, it's not miles away so small gains could make it a capable performer in F1's midfield group.
But with the name change to Audi looming next year, Bahrain testing was a bad start to what is an important season for the team. After all, if Sauber repeats its 2024 performance and ends up last, that's indicative of just how much work needs to be done to get it to a respectable level, let alone achieve Audi's aim of fighting for wins and championships.
Judged based on testing, it could be a long, hard season.
Mohammed Ben Sulayem/The FIA
F1-FIA relations are at a point where all sides are in trouble heading into the season because there are no winners in a relationship as strained as this one.
It's no secret there is a clear tension between the FIA president and various sides of F1, like the rulemaking bodies, the drivers and senior figures in the paddock.
Most recently, a demand from FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem for members of the World Motor Sport Council to sign non-disclosure agreements led to a vote taking place without high-ranking FIA officials who refused to sign that NDA - including deputy president for sport Robert Reid and Motorsport UK chairman David Richards.
That prompted Richards to launch a scathing public attack on Ben Sulayem's presidency, saying there had been a "distinct failure" to live up to his election promises.
That's highly significant given Richards was a key supporter of Ben Sulayem when he was elected in 2021.
We're yet to hear his direct response but so far Ben Sulayem has been fighting what he perceives as fire, with fire. The more leaks, the more he closes ranks. The more this is criticised, the more he doubles down. And we're about to find out how that will manifest in-season, with trouble brewing on both sides.
The opening race in Australia will be the first time the FIA has control over driver language on a race weekend, for example. Will a driver land themselves in hot water for a spur-of-the-moment slip of the tongue? Will Ben Sulayem come under fire from another high-profile figure? Will F1 stoke any flames by broadcasting incendiary radio messages?
For a long time, flashpoints between the president and different groups like moles within his own organisation, the media, the drivers, F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali, and so on, have ultimately been quick flare-ups that have rarely caused problems, without massive damage to F1 itself.
But when the composition of race control changes, or stewards are removed, or key figures lose faith in the process, there can quickly be a tangible cost to F1 and how a race weekend plays out.
