Formula 1 returned to the familiar surroundings of the Bahrain International Circuit for Day 1 of the Official Pre-Season Test, with teams ramping up their preparations for the 2022 campaign.
For some, the focus was mileage after a lack of it in Barcelona, for others it was all about longer stints on different tyre compounds as they experimented with various set-ups and fuel loads.
As ever, headline lap times are to be ignored – with performance runs expected to be held back until the final day on Saturday – but there was still plenty to be gathered from Thursday’s running…
Mercedes cause a stir
High on the agenda for paddock-goers on Thursday was getting a glimpse of the much anticipated new-spec Mercedes, which broke cover when it was wheeled out onto the grid for the annual pre-season photo – and boy did it deliver the wow-factor with a radical sidepod arrangement.
It certainly grabbed the attention of rival teams, who are all looking at each other trying to determine who has done the best job with the sweeping new regulations and whether or not they should borrow a concept and tweak their development direction going forward.
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said he was proud of his technical team, who have consistently pushed the boundaries of the technical regulations since they went on their as-yet unbroken run of constructors’ championship title wins that stretch back to 2014 – and who turned off the taps on last year’s development very early in the season to throw all their resource at this year’s machine.
It remains to be seen how quick the package is: it’s one thing to deliver an exciting concept, quite another to prove it is worth lap time. But that it caused so much chatter up and down the pit lane, and that our data team found they had the best race simulation pace of all, 0.29s better off than Red Bull, suggests the update kit has the potential to be special. We should find out over the next couple of days just how special.