Formula 1 pre-season testing: Who are the winners and losers?

Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc finished the test with the fastest lap time ever in emphatic fashion – 0.811 seconds faster than the next best time, set by Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli.

Key times in testing are not usually the place to gauge competitive standings, but this reflects the picture in an important way – Mercedes and Ferrari look set to enter the new season in top form.

“This test has confirmed that Ferrari and Mercedes look like two teams to beat,” world champion McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said on Friday evening. “McLaren and Red Bull” [are] “Maybe they are very similar, Ferrari and Mercedes are one step ahead.”

This image, an impression mirrored by many other bigwigs up and down the pit lane, comes even lower than the main lap times – even if the teams show in order Ferrari, Mercedes, McLaren, Red Bull – from the so-called race simulator rounds.

As teams fill their cars with gas and cover the Grand Prix distance, these have far fewer variables distorting the picture than individual laps.

On Friday evening, Leclerc ran his best race simulation of the week, and was slightly quicker than Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and McLaren’s Oscar Piastri the day before, when they set almost the same time.

Mercedes did not run any race simulations in the second week, only in the first week, when track conditions were a second slower.

Antonelli comfortably set the fastest race simulation in the first week – much faster than Piastri, who was running at the same time.

Teammate George Russell – the bookies’ favorite in the pre-season championship – was also impressively quick when running in hotter, slower conditions earlier in the day.

This is not an exact science, but the accumulation of data is what led to the conclusion reached by Stella and many others.

One complication was that McLaren was not using the latest spec power unit from Mercedes, so an improvement can be expected when in Australia they switch to the latest spec.

The other reason is Red Bull’s new engine, which Russell said has the best power distribution, which is an important aspect this season.

Mercedes’ biggest concern is reliability. This affected Antonelli more than Russell, but it is probably fair to say that Mercedes has had more problems than its main rivals, although Red Bull newcomer Isak Haggar has lost a fair portion of his career to problems of one kind or another.