After about 24 hours of on-track pre-season testing this past week, we are now officially one week away from the season’s first Formula 1 Grand Prix.
Before getting into rankings, there are a couple of notes to get through. The first is that all cars were generally reliable, and there were very few critical mechanical issues throughout the first three days.
One of the key reasons Max Verstappen won so many races last year was because Red Bull Racing built him a bulletproof car.
The rest of the teams have now caught up to them on the reliability front, which is to be a bit expected considering we’re in year three of the current regulations. I’ve been a proponent of extending points positions to the top 15 in a race for a while now due to just how reliable the cars are. Not having reliability issues or a new point system is likely to hurt midfield battles even more than last year.
The other note is that there were some issues with drain covers. On day two, Charles Leclerc scooped up a drain cover and damaged his underbody, causing an hour of testing to be cut.
On day three, the same thing happened to the Red Bull of Sergio Perez, causing another delay and forcing F1 to have one big seven-hour session to end the day instead of having a pre-planned hour for lunch.
This isn’t the first time the current regulation cars have been damaged by drain covers, with the first day of the Las Vegas Grand Prix last year being a mess owing to the issue.
The reality is that these ground-force cars create so much downforce that drain covers can absolutely be pulled up more easily with sustained running. There needs to be a serious investigation and experimentation done by the FIA to figure out how to fix this issue before the year goes too far forward.
And now, the rankings. Keep in mind that these are not necessarily a prediction of where each team will finish in the championship. This is simply where the order stands right now. It’s difficult to take strictly the times to heart in testing because cars are running all sorts of different plans and fuel loads.
Thus, it takes watching practice closely rather than pouring over the data to estimate where each team is now. Things might look different by race day next weekend. It could look different a month from now. It’ll definitely look different by October.
For the rankings, the teams on my list are divided into tiers. The cars in each tier should be able to compete with the…
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