Why the pre -season game of the F1 ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ will be more important than ever this year

On one of the paddocks in the Bahrain International Circuit with a view to the second sector, there was a number in the Formula -1 team equipment next to me.

“What do you do from all of this?” he said.

It was a driver who had come to the roof for the same reason to win a better viewpoint to creep up the cars the route, while the sun ends on the second day of the pre -season tests in 2024.

At that time, all teams had completed at least three race tracks with their new cars, which gave them a first understanding of how their 2024 challengers – performed the hopes of the entire workforce and millions of fans around the world.

Train how you compared with everyone else? It was more difficult to find out.

Red Bull was the big story on the track twelve months ago. After his 2023 season, the most dominant in F1 history, it seemed to be taken another Advantageous step with its car design. The driver agreed to me and raised the eyebrows.

“It’s so difficult to know,” he said. “Everyone seems to be similar to last year. With the exception of alpine, they fell back. “

He was right. Red Bull dominated at the beginning of the year and won the start of the season in Bahrain by over 20 seconds, and Alpine slipped back – only so that the fortune of both teams changes during the season.

It was a good teaching about how the “smoke and mirror” of the pre -season tests could be so difficult to decipher. When the pre-season tests begin in Bahrain on Wednesday, the lap times will only tell a half-truth, the real performance will deliberately be covered behind carefully choreographed runs and strategic misinformation. While the teams themselves know how their own cars develop, the reward of the months of hard work and development is how this compares to their competitors.

It could be particularly difficult to be one of the closest F1 seasons of all time, which many of the closest F1 seasons ever do for the three days of the pre -season in Bahrain.

“It’s a bit like” put your tail on the donkey “because you advise you,” said James Vowles, Team Director of Williams. “I think the field will be closest this year since I was in sports.”

In 2025, the last year of the current rules for the autodesign of the F1 will be before overhauling the next year, which will combine a significant shift in technical regulations with the introduction of new power units that run on fully sustainable fuels. In every major change of rule there is usually one or sometimes two teams (in 2022, Red Bull and Ferrari; in 2014, Mercedes) that steal a march on the field and blow the order apart for a few years before performance As regulations, ripe and the teams in the top innovate converges with decreasing returns.

F1 ended in 2024 with incredibly fine margins that separated the field, which were more difficult to find as design breakdowns for the front conductor, best through Red Bull’s fights in the mid-season. In the first qualification meeting for the season finale in Abu Dhabi, all 20 cars were covered with eight tenths of a second, while less than half a second in the 15th the knockout bubble was first separated. (In contrast, the gap between P1 and P15 in Q1 of the first GP .646S.) The leading quartet of McLaren, Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes had an advantage over the ‘midfield’, but all performance gaps had dropped.

The fine margins made the winter all the more important for teams to try their new car designs to win the most thousandth of a second. If an already tight field were converged, the battles could be intense throughout.

“Don’t let me excited!” Alpine’s Pierre Gasly said about the view of 0.1 seconds that separate a driver of Q1 and Q3. “I want us to be the best of midfield and challenge the top 4 on some occasions, as I did at the end of last year. I really hope it will be possible. “He admitted not to” disappointed “when the gaps grow up this year.

The fine margins who separated teams also explain why they often try to give away as little information as possible in the previous season so that their rivals could use as an advantage. At the O2 last week, not a single team presented their 2025 F1 car -most of them had a 2024 Show Car model, but instead in this year’s paint. Not only is the pressure removed to prepare all new parts for the updated car, but also prevents competitors from recognizing all the design elements that could give them the chance to play up.

The same applies in more regular start -ups when teams present their cars themselves. In 2022, Mercedes released a number of renders of his new car as part of his unveiling. The actual car with its radical, slim side -epod design, which dramatically shrank a crucial body plant section, looked quite different. The design concept proved to be a failure and finally forced the team to take a different direction in the middle of 2023.

The renders Mercedes were first published by the W13 (L) against the testing (R) (via Mercedes, Hasan Bratic/Defodi pictures about Getty pictures) (about Mercedes).

Until the cars leave the pit lane for the test of the test in Bahrain. TV cameras and photographers who follow every movement is nowhere to be hidden. However, it is still possible that teams are trying to mask their pace by using different engine modes to slow down additional fuel to make the car heavier, or the bonds of the driver, at certain points on the route to withdraw.

It often means that the working time tables can be deceptive. Ferrari contributed the fastest and most secondary times last year, but only a few in the paddock believed that someone would beat Red Bull, a prediction that proved to be true when Max Verstappen won the Bahrain GP with 22 seconds.

“If you are currently playing with 10 kilos of fuel, that’s about three tenths (from one second) or the electricity unit modes that can be up to a second will be less than that,” said Vowles.

“I don’t think someone has gone away with the confidence of Bahrain (tests) where they really classified. And that’s great: we want that in sports. I cannot predict who will win the championship or how the midfield will shake out. “

Although the teams can at least create a rough wood row, how things can form for opening races through data analysis or how the driver on the roof easily observes how the cars work on the route, there will always be a degree of uncertainty.

“I think that until the third day we will hopefully be able to give a reasonable picture of where everyone is,” said Esteban Ocon, who joined Haas for 2025. “They always doubt. You are never 100 percent sure. But I think it gets a little clearer from there. “

As difficult as it is for drivers and teams to know exactly how their rivals go through tests, they can quickly find out what their own cars do.

“Within five rounds, you know whether you have a good season or not,” said George Russell, whose Mercedes team has not managed in winter tests since 2020. “We knew in the first five rounds of recent years that we would not fight for the championship, or at least we knew that we would not fight at the beginning of the season.”

Mercedes fought for resistance according to these technical regulations and dropped fourth in the championship last year. “Every year we uncovered a problem, we solved it and it created a new one,” said Russell. For 2025 he believed that Mercedes’ simulator preparations were more than ever more disciplined to “ensure that we do not get into a new trap”. Whether it is sufficient against the competition is another matter.

“We saw it with many other teams: they bring in an upgrade and it doesn’t work,” said Russell. “So there are never guarantees.”

For this reason, most F1 drivers concentrate to do the best job that you may be able to do with the car available. Verstappen claimed this approach last year in the middle of Red Bull’s burglary in the form of Red Bull and know the best chance to get an improved car – one with a wider operating window with conditions for top performance – through the winter. It is considered a waste of time.

“Every team, especially the midfield teams, improves so much that they believe that they have taken a really good step, and they did it too, but other midfield teams did it, if not more,” said Williams -Driver Alex Alex Albon.

Alex Albon blocks on the first day of the F1 tests on the Bahrain International Circuit on February 21, 2024 (Clive Mason/Getty Images).

“The only thing you can see from Bahrain tests in the first 15 to 20 journeys of driving is whether the car has the feeling that they have gone in the right direction or not. So that’s a lot going on. Then it tries to reappear the car and bring it to a good window for Melbourne. “

Only when the qualification in Australia is clear on March 15 and gives an indication of which team may have stepped forward or has gained an advantage for winter. Even then, the special requirements of this route may not be the whole season, which means that even caution must be submitted.

“If you look at yourself last year, I don’t think that there are really trends where cars are going well and if you do badly,” said Russell. “I think who wins in Melbourne or when a team dominates, I don’t think they will dominate the season.

“If you win the first four races, that’s a better indicator.”

Toptoto by Max Verstappen: Clive Mason/Getty Images