There will be just three days of preseason testing before the opening race weekend of the 2023 Formula One season, and they are about to get underway Thursday through Saturday.
The number of test days has been halved this year due to stability in the regulations from last year, and all three days will be held at the same Bahrain International Circuit that hosts the first race on March 5.
F1 testing always generates excitement among fans as the drivers get back on track, but the timesheets at the end of each day can be misleading. Below is a guide to what testing is all about and how much you should read into the headline lap times from the upcoming track action.
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F1 cars are meticulous pieces of engineering, but at this time of the year they also represent 200 mph science experiments. While a great deal of work goes into making a new F1 car go fast over the winter, there’s still the potential that the wheels come off (sometimes literally) when the it leaves the garage for the first time.
As a result, F1 teams go through rigorous debugging and refining processes with their cars before the first race to make sure they are as fast and reliable as possible when the lights go out at the first race. In the past this process was often spread over more than 10 days of preseason testing, but to save costs, the number of test days has now been reduced to three.
The opening morning of testing is usually spent running system checks on the car to make sure everything is operating as it should. Although teams have advanced test benches at their factories and will likely have completed a 100km shakedown prior to Bahrain, nothing compares to running the car all day in the heat of Bahrain’s desert sun.
Checks of the hydraulic system, electrical system and cooling systems are crucial early on the first day to flush out any potential reliability issues. In race specification an F1 car carries over 300 sensors to ensure its extreme tolerances are not breached, but in testing that number is much higher so as to harvest as much real-world data as possible.
Sensors are sometimes too small to spot or exist under the bodywork, but when it comes to understanding a car’s aerodynamics they are usually impossible to miss. Big metal fences known as rakes are attached to the cars behind sensitive areas of airflow to measure air pressure and understand…
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