Imagine if a football team had just three days to do all of its physical and tactical training ahead of a new season. Or if a tennis player was given a new type of racket the week ahead of a Grand Slam tournament and allowed just a day and half to get accustomed to it (assuming the strings didn’t break on the first day and limit that time further).
That’s pretty much what Formula One‘s teams and drivers will face this week as they are granted just three days of preseason testing at the Bahrain International Circuit to understand how their brand-new cars work in the real world. And because F1’s regulations dictate that each team can have only one car on track at any time during those three days, the two drivers will have to share that single car, reducing their track time to less than 12 hours each (minus time in the garage fixing issues and changing setups).
But unlike a football training session, F1 testing generates a huge amount of excitement among fans. Often the lap times are at best inconclusive or at worst misleading, but after a winter starved of track action, how can you not get carried away with Red Bull’s pace in the middle sector or the way in which the Ferrari’s lap times drop off a cliff after just 10 laps?
Below is a guide to what testing is all about and just how much you should read into the headline lap times from the next three days in Bahrain.
Why do F1 teams go testing?
F1 cars are meticulously engineered and carefully built, but ahead of the first race of the season, they also represent 200 mph science experiments. While a great deal of time and money is spent making sure a new F1 car goes fast in simulations over the winter, there’s still the potential for the wheels come off (sometimes literally) when it leaves the garage for the first time in real life.
As a result, F1 teams go through a rigorous debugging and refining process with their cars before the first race to make sure they are as fast and reliable as possible when the lights go out on a new season. In the past, this process was spread over more than 10 days of preseason testing in Spain, but to cut costs, the number of test days has now been reduced to just three and they take place the week before the first race at the same venue.
The opening morning of testing is usually spent running system checks on the car to make sure…
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