There are many ways to attempt to work out the Formula 1 pecking order from pre-season testing.
I prefer to use the laptimes as far as possible, which can be adjusted for factors such as tyre compounds and a team's typical fuel strategy in testing based on historical data to create a clearer - or should I say less muddy - method for adjusting the times.
When you are inside a team, you know exactly what the fuel load and run plans are for a car at any given time. You will have a fair idea of what your rivals are doing on that front, but can never be exactly sure, so there's even plenty of educated guesswork for the teams too.
One important factor is the knowledge of what teams have historically used based on comparing pre-season testing to what happened when they returned to that circuit in previous years. 2024's pre-season testing was in Bahrain and they then returned a week later for the first race weekend, so a fairly quick turn around meant not much of a car spec change.
That, combined with allowing for differences in tyre compounds, makes it possible to come up with a modified time ranking. It's never perfect but I think it's clearer than just the actual headline times.
This approach always creates an interesting ranking, and this year highlights an interesting potential concern for McLaren. While it was clearly fast on high fuel in testing, it was a little different on single-lap pace.
There were times when a potentially faster lap wasn't completed, for example Oscar Piastri because of a mistake on day two, and the one Lando Norris aborted after the final corner on day three, but I have always put an emphasis on any development direction minimising potential drivers mistakes, so I wonder if the rear instability is making the car trickier when it comes to lower fuel performance running.
I doubt that will be enough to mean the McLarens aren't a threat for pole position, but it does suggest that there might be a bigger problem there than the team realises. That's something I'll be looking out for when qualifying starts in Australia.
Team principal Andrea Stella commented on rear stability being necessary in Bahrain and I agree every circuit has different requirements, but in general a driver-friendly car will be decent if not exceptional everywhere.
It is those qualifying laps, when the driver is at ten-tenths, when they need the confidence in the car be it front or rear. If the rear is unstable, it very quickly leads to a mistake which can cost tenths of a second, if not whole seconds, and means the team will have to adjust the set-up and probably induce some understeer. This will very quickly negate any performance advantage from the car having too peaky an aerodynamic performance profile.
Let's look more closely at the numbers from testing. In this first graph, I have taken the pre-season test times from 2024 for each driver and adjusted them to the pace on the C3 tyre based on what we know about the performance offsets - i.e. there's an estimated 0.3s gap between the C4 and C3 tyres. They're corrected to the C3s because that's the softest compound used on the race weekend, so it's the qualifying tyre of choice.
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Then, I averaged each team's drivers' laptimes from that test to get what could be called a ‘team laptime'. I have then compared that to the average of both drivers' lap times from qualifying. I then used the difference in those two average lap times, and with a time loss of 0.3s per 10kg of fuel, to come up with a theoretical fuel load for each team.
We then have a fuel load and called it the ‘team testing fuel load philosophy'. This could be made up of fuel and engine modes, but it gives me a number to apply to the times set in 2025 pre-season testing.
The only difference is that I have only used Nico Hulkenberg and Alex Albon's times from testing last year for Haas and Williams. That's because their team-mates' laptimes (Kevin Magnussen and Logan Sargeant) were way off, so if I used them the fuel load for Haas and Williams fell way out of line from what I would have expected. Haas probably focused least on single lap pace in both tests, so potentially that means its headline laptime data is the least representative of all.
This data allows me to put together the 2025 testing graph with a time adjustment. Again using +0.3s between the C4 and C3 tyres, I have equalised the laptime to the softest tyre that will be used when they return for Bahrain qualifying in 2025. This laptime is then reduced by the potential fuel load, which I have derived from 2024 pre-season testing and the actual 2024 qualifying. This generates a new set of laptimes. I have called that the ‘potential team lap time'.
Yes, there are many assumptions in this methodology, but it reduces the risk of data being skewed by one driver making a mistake or another driver running much lower fuel etc. Nothing is perfect, but this allows us to look past the headline laptimes.
In reality, as far as McLaren are concerned I don't think it will be down there and I don't think Williams and Alpine will be where they are either. But other than what I explained above regarding Williams and Haas, it is using the same data and calculation for all the teams and this is the result.
It's probably a bit like what the teams call ‘correlation problems'. The answer is only as good as the data that feeds it.
I doubt any of the top four teams would have gone away from this pre-season test happy. Yes McLaren was mighty with its race pace with both drivers, but I'm not sure the car was quite as good in lower fuel performance runs.
It seemed fairly easy for either driver in any of those top four teams to make mistakes. Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull seemed to have some degree of understeer at times.
As for the midfield, Alpine and Williams look like they will be the next bunch. Both cars looked reasonable and for both teams it's a positive step ahead of this time last year.
The other four teams just didn't seem to have the pace. This is the fourth and last season for these current ground effect rules, so there has been a convergence in design concepts. But it's not always what we visually see from the outside, it's down to the detail we can't see under the car and under the bodywork.
Melbourne is a different track to Sakhir, but it is one of 24 races this season so it counts for the championships just the same as the other 23 do. As we saw last year, Max Verstappen won the drivers' championship based on his strong start to the season, while McLaren and Ferrari battled to the very last race of the season for the constructors' championship.
With a major regulation change for 2026, most teams, if they haven't already done so, will need to split their technical boffins quite early to allow them to focus on 2026. To add to that, 2026 doesn't allow for component carryover so late season development will simply affect your cost cap expenditure for 2025 with very little time to reap the rewards.
Let's see what happens in Melbourne. Then we can talk again about how we still don't have a clue!
