A comprehensive guide to F1’s preseason testing
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.
Editor’s PicksDaytona 500 is never fair but Byron’s victory is no fluke2dRyan McGeeF1
livery Power Rankings: The best and worst looks of 20247dESPNCan anyone in
F1 catch Red Bull in 2024?9dLaurence Edmondson2 Related
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 everything is operating as it should. Although teams
have advanced test benches at their factories and will likely have
completed a 200-kilometre shakedown prior to arriving in Bahrain, nothing
compares to running the car all day in the heat of the desert sun.
Checks on the cooling system, hydraulic system and electrical system are
crucial early on the first day to flush out any potential reliability
issues. In its race specification, an F1 car carries more than 300 sensors
creating up to 90MB of data per lap, but in testing those numbers are much
higher so as to harvest as much real-world data as possible.
Sensors on F1 cars are sometimes too small to spot and often are placed
under the bodywork to measure temperature, inertia and loads, but when it
comes to understanding a car’s aerodynamics, the sensors are often
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 the flow structures around the car.
The rakes are made up of a series of pitot tubes, and their readings are
compared with the work the teams have conducted over the winter in the wind
tunnel and via CFD (computational fluid dynamics). If the real-world data
matches up with the simulations, a team is already several steps closer to
extracting the true potential of the car at the first race. If it doesn’t,
the team is already on the back foot.
Another method for understanding real-world airflow around a car’s surfaces
is to douse it in “flow-vis” paint and see how the colourful water-based
liquid spreads across the bodywork at speed. This surprisingly simple
method allows engineers to see if the aerodynamic surfaces are having their
intended impact on the airflow.
Feedback from the driver is also key to understanding a new car. Simple
things such as the seating position often need to be adjusted, and long
days in the cockpit are the best way to find out what’s comfortable and
what’s not. Steering feedback and brake feel are also early boxes to tick,
although it can take more than half a season before a driver is truly happy
with the finer details. More experienced drivers can also help engineers
understand where lap time is leaking away by describing the behaviour of
the car through the corners.
Aero rakes, seen here positioned behind the front wheels of Oscar Piastri’s
McLaren, are common sightings at any F1 test. Hasan Bratic/picture alliance
via Getty Images
Once it’s been established that the fundamentals of the car are operating
as they should, teams turn their attention to setup. Finding the right
setup is crucial to unlocking performance, and knowing how a car will react
to different ride heights, wing angles and suspension settings helps
engineers build up a toolbox of solutions to exploit in different
situations later in the season.
Engineers will spend large parts of testing sweeping through different
setup combinations to find out what works and what doesn’t across different
fuel loads and tyre compounds. Gaining as much knowledge as possible at
this stage of the year can pay dividends later on in the season when
handling issues appear in the heat of competition.
A reliable car that responds well to setup changes is the aim by the final
day of preseason, along with reams of data to inform the next steps of car
development back at the factory.
How to spot who’s quick and who’s not
The lap times as they appear on the timing screens are rarely an accurate
picture of the competitive order. A light fuel load and fresh soft tyres
can make an average car look faster than the most competitive car on high
fuel and used hard tyres. As a result, the order at the end of each day
should be treated with caution.
It’s always much easier to spot the teams having a bad time in testing as
the clearest sign that a new car is struggling is a lack of mileage. While
that will usually indicate a reliability issue, it also means the team is
not progressing with the performance of the car simply because it is not
getting the track time or data to move forward.
LISTEN TO ‘UNLAPPED’Katie George, Nate Saunders and Laurence Edmondson geek out about Formula
One and the personalities behind it on “Unlapped,” ESPN’s weekly F1
podcast. Listen to ‘Unlapped’
Assuming the car is reliable, the vibe around a team during testing can
also indicate where it stands. Engineers and drivers are always keen to
play down expectations at this time of year, but in the close-knit F1
paddock, confidence levels become increasingly easy to gauge after a couple
of days at the track.
Despite the fastest times for each team being potentially misleading, it is
still possible to piece together a vague picture of who’s quick and who’s
not by digging deeper into the available data. By recognising certain
patterns in the lap times, you can gain a better understanding of what’s
really going on and start to make predictions about who has found the
biggest step in performance over the winter.
Performance runs
These are the laps where the team is trying to get a better understanding
of the car’s performance over a single lap. They are easy to spot as the
drivers will alternate between “hot laps” and “cool-down laps,” creating a
tell-tale pattern of fast, slow, fast, slow on the timing screens.
Drivers have to intersperse their fast laps with slower ones to allow the
tyres to recover after being pushed hard on the previous lap and to
recharge the battery in the car’s hybrid system, which will use up most of
its power on a qualifying-style lap.
Tyre compounds are key to one-lap performance, and Pirelli offers all five
of its compounds to the teams during testing. The compounds are numbered
C1, C2, C3, C4 and C5, with the C1 being the hardest and the C5 being the
softest. Softer rubber provides more performance but is less durable,
meaning the softest compound might be good for only a single lap before it
loses its peak performance.
The fastest times in testing are usually set on the softest tyres, but if a
car using C2s is only a tenth of a second slower than a car on C5s, it’s
likely the car on the harder compound has an underlying pace advantage.
Temperatures also fluctuate throughout the day, with Bahrain offering its
optimum track conditions once the sun has set and the tarmac has cooled. As
a result, a time set on C5s in the heat of the midday sun is not comparable
with a time set on the same compound under the floodlights late in the day.
These are all factors that need to be taken into account when looking at
the fastest laps each day, but even if you know the tyre compound and the
time of day at which the lap was set — which are both public information
— you still know only half the story.
play2:24Toto Wolff reveals the W15 for the 2024 seasonToto Wolff speaks about
Mercedes’ W15 for the 2024 season and his hopes for the coming year.
A car’s fuel load is a major factor in performance, and 10 kilograms will
add roughly 0.3 second of lap time. Put another way, a car with a full tank
at the Bahrain International Circuit will be more than 3.5 seconds per lap
slower than a car running on fumes. The reality is that most of the time
the teams will run a fuel load somewhere in between, as the extra weight of
running on a full tank will damage the tyres after a handful of laps and
running on qualifying amounts of fuel will mean the car must return to the
pits more often to refuel.
There is no way of knowing how much fuel a car has on board from the
outside, and teams are not obliged to hand out figures. As a result, the
most impressive lap time in testing might be set by a team running with 40
kilograms of fuel in the tank, while a fundamentally slower car can look
surprisingly competitive by running with 20 kilograms or less. Loading the
car with fuel during testing is often referred to as “sandbagging” — F1
speak for a team intentionally hiding its performance — but the truth is
that a fuel load between 60 kilograms and 30 kilograms offers a more
practical baseline for understanding car performance over a run of a
sensible length.
Unfortunately, the most useful tool to cut through the secrecy and make
sense of lap times isn’t available to fans and the media. Teams closely
monitor GPS traces of rival cars to gather data on both corner speeds and
straight-line speed, allowing them to build a clearer picture of true car
performance. The speed at which a car accelerates and brakes is useful to
guesstimate both its engine mode and fuel load, and at the click of a
mouse, that data can be cross-referenced with previous years’ test sessions
or races to identify trends and spot anomalies.
What’s more, F1 teams are creatures of habit and will often stick with a
set fuel load for testing from one year to the next. As staff move from
team to team over seasons, it doesn’t take long for an experienced engineer
to build up a bank of data and knowledge to help sift through the times
popping up on the timing screens and pick out the true star performers.
Long runs
One way of removing the uncertainty over fuel loads is to look for teams
attempting “race simulations.” In an ideal test, most teams will aim to
complete a race simulation by the end of the three days so that they can
gain an understanding of how the car performs over a grand prix distance
and to gather data that could increase their points haul a week later at
the first race.
Engineers will crawl all over F1 cars throughout their three days of
testing in Bahrain this week. Peter Fox/Getty Images
In order to complete a race distance without returning to the garage to
refuel, cars will need to leave the pits at the start of the run with close
to the maximum fuel load of 110 kilograms. And once we know cars are
starting out with the same fuel load to complete the same number of laps,
it makes it much easier to compare performance.
It’s not an exact science because the time of day, track conditions, engine
modes and tyre strategies can skew the results, but as a general rule it is
the best way to build a more accurate picture of performance by removing
some of the questions over fuel load. Race sims can easily be spotted by a
series of slow but steady lap times over long runs that are interspersed by
race-style pit stops, where the pit crew will practice tyre changes as it
would do in a real race. Alternatively, if you see that a driver’s pit
board is counting down from 57 laps (the length of a grand prix in Bahrain)
the chances are the team is attempting a race sim.
By working out an average lap time from each driver’s race sim, it’s
possible to get the best indication of how quick a car really is over a lap
compared to its rivals. However, because race sims are usually among the
last tasks on a team’s job list, it’s possible the team simply won’t be
able to fit them in over the three-day schedule. If that’s the case, it
will be back to guesstimating fuel loads in an attempt to compare cars like
for like.
Add a pinch of salt
While some kind of order usually emerges from testing, it’s not always
representative of the first race. This year the sole preseason test and the
first race are being held at the same venue, Bahrain, improving the chances
of an accurate prediction. But even so, a lot can change in a week.
Teams always hope to develop rapidly at the start of a new season as they
gain an on-track understanding of their cars to compare with simulation
data. A car that starts slowly might be a few setup changes away from
unlocking significantly more pace, but the key to that performance might
present itself only after the data has been fully analysed at the end of
testing. Based on the data gathered over the three days, teams will also be
able to refine their setups in the driver-in-loop simulators back at their
factories.
What’s more, the cars that run in testing this week might look surprisingly
basic or underdeveloped when we look back at them at the end of the year.
For the bigger teams, some updates will come as early as the first race,
and it’s not unheard of for performance to be unlocked by an upgrade
between testing and the season opener.
Source: How can you tell who’s quick at F1 preseason testing this week? Laurence Edmondson reveals his paddock-honed tips for deciphering test times.
