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F1 LIVE: Second day of winter testing action in Bahrain
It's winter testing ahead of the 2025 F1 season, having completed the first day of activities at the Bahrain International Circuit yesterday, teams are gearing to take the track on the second of the three total days they will have before the season gets underway in Australia in a little over two weeks' time.
F1 LIVE: Second day of winter testing action in Bahrain
What happened during the 1st day of testing?
McLaren topped the afternoon session with Lando Norris behind the wheel. Behind him, George Russell confirmed the pace set by teammate Andrea Kimi Antonelli, leader of the morning session for Mercedes. In third came Max Verstappen, whose comments regarding the RB21's behaviour supported those of his teammate's Liam Lawson, who finished P2 in the morning session. Both Williams drivers, Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz also had strong first days,
Ferrari and Haas are the big question marks. The two teams were in an upward trend and both in one-lap pace as well as during the long-runs they failed to deliver on recent expectations. Of course, not much must be read into this since it's only the first day of running and there's still much more to come.
Winter testing in Bahrain
Being the final year of the very complex ground effect regulations, teams are forced into a critical balancing act: how much of their resources will they allocate to the development of their 2025 cars? And, perhaps even more important: when will they shift focus entirely to next year's car?
An early start doesn't always guarantee succes, seeing as Mercedes, McLaren and Ferrari all switched their attention to the ground effect cars ahead of time in 2021 and neither of them were able to fight for the title in the two seasons that followed. A late switch isn't always detrimental, one need only ask Red Bull Racing, up until 2024 the dominant force in F1.
During the three days of running in the Middle-Eastern circuit teams and drivers will focus on making sure they have correlation between the their simulation tools and the actual performance on track, learning as much as they can of their cars and their operating window, how well the systems work, their tyre degradation levels, and they will, of course, try as many set-up variations as they can.
Come Australia cars may look very different
How is this possible? With testing being so limited as it is in F1 due to the high costs testing represents, teams use the data provided by the three days of winter running to confirm what they believe their cars' strengths and weaknesses will be, and in the two remaining two weeks they will finish honing the parts they've already had in development, even prior to the days of testing. That's the level of foresight and preparation Formula 1 teams have in order to attain their outlined goals.
Though there seems to be very little at stake, winter testing usually paints a decent picture of where the teams are in the pecking order. However, human nature will frequently be the tell-tale sign of an F1 outfit's condition ahead of the season's start. Plenty of smiles, relaxed and confident attitudes are dead give aways, whereas lots of time spent in the garage instead of the track, possibly behind the curtains, worried faces, are often signs of troubled times ahead.
Results of the first day of winter testing
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