We’ll only really know the true winners and losers from Formula 1 2025’s pre-season test in Melbourne, but that won’t stop us (or the teams) from making some early conclusions.
Based on observations fed back from our F1 team on the ground in Bahrain - fresh from spending numerous hours trackside and having hundreds of paddock conversations with all the key players - we’ve picked out who’s had a good test and who has a lot of work to do before Melbourne.
Winner - McLaren
Picking a title favourite after testing is tricky but the most logical answer has to be McLaren.
First, there’s Lando Norris’s eye-catching day two long run which was backed up by Oscar Piastri topping the race simulations on the final day and only being denied a session-topping time by a moment at the final corner.
McLaren has been the name on almost every rival’s lips when asked who’s looking the strongest and with good reason. It’s even reignited a ‘mini-DRS’ war.
Its advantage makes it in no way a certain winner in Melbourne but none of the other top four teams from 2024 looked as convincing over the three days as McLaren did. - Josh Suttill
Loser - Red Bull
Red Bull delivered the first big shock of F1 2025 pre-season by bringing a very familiar looking car to testing.
Changes have been made versus the RB20 but they don’t seem to be working, from what the team has said so far and what our team has seen trackside.
“It is going in the right direction, just maybe the magnitude of the direction was not as big as we expected,” is a pretty stark early verdict from technical director Pierre Wache.
There’s already talk of fixes needed for the opening races and it’s clear the team is yet to achieve its goal of broadening the working window of the car.
That leaves Red Bull in a worrying position where it might not have seen the last of its mid-2024 pain. - JS
Winner - Kimi Antonelli
You could make a strong case for Mercedes being a winner in this test, as in a far cry from some of its troubled and baffled starts to other recent seasons, it looked quick, comfortable and optimistic all week - and somewhere around Ferrari on pace, firmly in the top three mix.
But given the huge disparity between Mercedes' highs and lows during 2024, we need to see a few races of consistent performance to believe it's really turned a corner.
What stood out even more from this test was how normal Kimi Antonelli being in this car already looks. An 18-year-old rookie stepping into the car vacated by F1's most successful ever driver looks like an absolutely unremarkable move - in the best possible way - when you see Antonelli on track and the times he's producing. - Matt Beer
Winner - Lewis Hamilton
Testing was never going to definitively tell us whether or not Lewis Hamilton’s blockbuster move was going to be a success or a failure, but it has given us the first hint of how it will start.
And Hamilton’s walking away with the best feeling from a car that he’s had from a pre-season in this ground effect era, something that could hint at him laying to rest some of the ghosts that blighted his final year with Mercedes.
There was plenty of “I’m really enjoying the car”-type sentiment that was more than simply a byproduct of it being his honeymoon period of driving a Ferrari for the first time in pre-season testing.
Hamilton has a better feeling with the SF-25 than the somewhat disconnected ground effect era Mercedes cars, particularly on Thursday morning.
We didn’t get to see a proper race simulation from Hamilton on Friday, so there are still plenty of question marks, but this feels like as solid a start as he could have hoped for 39 days on from his first day in Maranello. - JS
Loser - Aston Martin
Aston Martin was quickest to send its post-test press release out (34 minutes after the day three chequered flag) but it doesn’t look like a winner from the development war so far.
The team’s main objective of the AMR25 was being a more driver-friendly platform than its predecessor, and the early signs are positive.
The problem is, as new team boss Andy Cowell puts it, “we have also discovered areas that could be better and need more focus”. That should give Adrian Newey plenty to think about when he starts on Monday.
Right now it looks like it's going to face a proper fight to lead the midfield, a continuation of where it was (an only occasional points scorer) at the end of 2024, rather than the solid midfield leader highs of early 2024.
Aston’s 2026 project is properly exciting but it looks like it will have plenty of work to do on its 2025 too. - JS
Winner - Williams
Williams has talked a good game for a while, but with the high profile arrival of Carlos Sainz and the lucrative arrival of sponsor Atlassian, a troubled first test would've immediately rung alarm bells and raised questions over whether its progress would live up to the hopes of those who've been convinced to join the project.
No such worries.
While ending the week with the fastest time of all was obviously not a true picture of where Williams stands, all the indications are that it's moved to the top of the midfield and starts 2025 much better prepared than it was a year ago (and faster too). - MB
Loser - Anyone who tried to watch all of testing
In the days of scant coverage of testing beyond website blogs, fans (and the media) would've loved the level of broadcast effort that now goes into it.
But ultimately what amounts to a 24-hour-long FP1 session with only half the field running at a time isn't a great spectacle. Even less so if there aren't many standout storylines because things are actually going pretty serenely well for most of the teams.
Testing is probably best enjoyed in snapshots and post-session analysis after all. - MB
Winner - Alpine
What a difference 12 months makes for Alpine.
Last year it was limping around with an overweight and slow car and faced the prospect of genuinely being F1’s slowest team, a humbling experience for any works outfit.
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But so far, its 2025 car is looking like a solid evolution of the respectable midfield car that the team was able to engineer its disaster of a launch machine into during 2024.
Alpine looks to be in the mix to lead the midfield and has genuinely had a smooth week with positive feedback from both its drivers.
It can target Q3 appearances and points in Melbourne, a far cry from the embarrassment of qualifying last and second-last for last year’s season-opener. - JS
Loser - Sauber
Edd Straw continually saw trackside just how hard Nico Hulkenberg and Gabriel Bortoleto had to hustle the Sauber in testing.
“It looked appalling initially, they did make set-up changes on the first day that improved matters significantly, but still to the point where it was the car that you least wanted to be in,” was Straw’s verdict.
It doesn’t look particularly quick either. It’s not in 2019 Williams or even start-of-2024 Alpine territory but in such a small field, Sauber may well find itself cast adrift once again.
That’s hardly ideal for rookie Bortoleto who is already hamstrung by not having the F1 test experience that his former F2 rivals like Kimi Antonelli or Ollie Bearman have benefited from, nor Hulkenberg who is far too elite a driver in F1’s midfield to be lumbered with F1’s slowest car. - JS
