F1 Testing 2025 (Undercutters Ep10 transcript)
How Useful is Testing? 0m 15s
Testing’s interesting for comparing the new cars and perhaps sizing up new drivers too. But its accuracy in predicting pace has declined a lot from days gone by. In 2009, Button and Barrichello were driving for Brawn and were fantastically quick in testing. This was an accurate form guide, as Brawn dominated the early races. However, there was less scope for sandbagging back then. Fuel tanks were a lot smaller as this was during the refuelling era, which meant you could neither run on fumes nor fully fuel to significantly alter the headline lap time. Similarly, the Bridgestone tyres of the day did not really degrade, so it wasn’t like today with the wide range of Pirellis that can lose performance over time. Engine modes were less sophisticated too.Nowadays, testing can be useful for mood music, but even here it can lead people astray. Heading into 2024, after testing, many thought that Haas would be poor. Instead, they were competitive within the midfield all season long. Contrary to expectations, it was Alpine that had a dog of a car for the first part of 2024.
Weak reliability can be spotted. If an engine blows every time the driver starts pushing then testing will show this up. But reliability these days tends to be pretty solid.
It’s also worth noting that smart chaps, such as Ted Kravitz of Ted’s Notebook fame, can sometimes provide useful insights. He was the man who mentioned Aston Martin in 2023, and Alonso duly got numerous podium finishes in the first half of the 2023 F1 season.
Formula 1 Testing can be useful but it’s also capable of being pretty misleading. Generally speaking, the mood music has been fairly useful as a guide in recent years. But ignore headline times. These are massaged and manipulated either to try and look flashy to attract sponsor interest or to sandbag and mislead rivals. I am going to include some times in this episode, because I know people are interested in that, but be sure you take them with a pinch of salt.
F1 News 2m 35s
F1 News.This is going before we look at testing because quite a lot of news is about cars and design changes, and it makes more sense to have that leading into testing rather than afterwards.
But first: the Monaco Grand Prix in 2024 was a rare boring race, after some early crashing. This enabled everyone to have a free pit stop and made the usually processional race even more tedious, as everyone trundled around until the end without bothering to have any excitement along the way.
To try and remedy this, it’s been decided Monaco will have a minimum of two stops. We will see if this makes things more exciting or just leads to another procession with an extra pit stop.
We also had the F1 75 Launch Event. This was a showbiz livery reveal event, and we also got to see most of the cars for the first time. It’s worth noting that cars can often be different between livery reveals and testing, and even from testing to the first race, so changes are highly likely to occur between now and the season’s start, at least for some teams.
Among the teams likely to be competing to be best of the rest there’s a pretty broad mix of approaches to designing their 2025 Formula 1 cars.
Haas has a technical arrangement with Ferrari and typically takes as much as the rules permit from the bigger team. This means it has the minimal amount of designing to do itself. However, the 2025 Haas F1 car has not copied Ferrari’s altered front suspension setup and has instead stuck with the 2024 version.
This is a bold call, and speaks of confidence on behalf of Haas. The upside is that they have a full understanding of the present setup, which is pushrod, and won’t need any extra time to get to grips with it. The downside is that Ferrari clearly believe the new pullrod version will be better over the course of the season. Altering the suspension means changing the aerodynamic design, so sticking with the older pushrod style means there’s no need to change the aerodynamic approach.
Haas performed well throughout the whole of the 2024 Formula 1 season, starting with decent pace and outdeveloping RB over the course of the year. This level of understanding has evidently given them the confidence to take a brave decision regarding the front suspension.
At the rear, the Haas is using the 2025 Ferrari pullrod suspension and gearbox. Likewise, Haas is mostly using the newest Ferrari parts elsewhere on their car. Broadly speaking, the Haas is a more evolved version of the 2024 car rather than drastically different. The main design decision taken is to stick with their pushrod suspension at the front, contrary to the way Ferrari have gone.
Haas had a good tussle with Alpine last year, narrowly losing out in the end. Alpine are also going for a conservative approach, which makes sense given how well their car was working at the conclusion of the 2024 season. This even extends to reusing part of the 2024 chassis, making the new Alpine very much an updated version of last year’s car rather than a whole new approach.
Haas and Alpine have aspirations to be best of the rest in the F1 2025 season, but in recent years Aston Martin has held that position. However, unlike its rivals, the Aston Martin car has been more thoroughly redesigned. The reason for this is that their strong result in 2024 was built entirely on early season pace, and they ended in a much weaker position compared to rivals having failed to maintain their relative pace advantage due to poor development.
Unlike Alpine and Haas, happy with their cars at the end of 2024 and looking to update and refine them rather than opt for something very new, Aston Martin has undergone a near total aerodynamic redesign. In addition to using their own wind tunnel, the team also has a new simulator which will hopefully see them develop better through 2025 than in 2024. It’s worth noting that Aston Martin have stated their upgrades did work as anticipated but the 2024 car’s persistent lack of stability was the limiting factor.
The day before testing Red Bull revealed their car. Sort of. It looked pretty much identical to the 2024 car, leading some people to assume this was typical Red Bull shenanigans of hiding the real deal until the last minute, and a few wry comments that without Adrian Newey they forgot they had to design a new one. It seems that there have been changes but these are very slight and subtle.
In my ranking the rookies episode I placed Bortoleto last of those I expect to finish the season, largely because I think Sauber will again be the slowest car on the grid by some margin. In common with a few other teams, the changes appear to be very much on the fine-tuning evolution side, rather than dramatically different to their dreadful 2024 car. There are some little extra details, such as a mini-element just outside the wing mirrors. To be fair, the team did start to unlock some pace at the end of the season, so I still expect them to fight for points more often than last year.
From the back of the grid to the front, the new Mercedes has a split approach to the side pods, with one part horizontal and the other part vertical. This striking approach is similar to Red Bull. The shape of the sidepod has also been altered to make it sleeker, with a steeper angle. Inconsistency was the bane of Mercedes last season, with the car sometimes seeming to be on a knife edge, so they’ll be hoping the 2025 version is not just faster, but more predictable.
There’s also some driver-related news, with a rumour that Aston Martin are seeking to acquire the services of Max Verstappen in a deal said to be worth £1bn. The question is whether he’d replace Alonso or Stroll. The former seems the obvious candidate, as Alonso is very much the elder statesman of the grid and the latter is the owner’s son. However, Stroll does look pretty unhappy. I wouldn’t be surprised if he chose to leave F1 sooner or later. It might be that Verstappen, should he join Aston Martin, will end up alongside another new driver there.
F1 Testing Day 1 9m 33s
And so to day 1 of F1 testing in 2025.
It was a bit cooler than expected for the test, with an anticipated maximum high of 19 degrees Celsius. As temperature can make a huge difference to performance this will matter and the test might not provide all the information teams want. This is also true for cooling, which can be critical at some circuits.
In the morning of the first day of F1 testing we saw most of the rookies running (with the exceptions of Bortoleto and Hadjar). Everything went pretty smoothly, with no crashes to report or cars losing power. The number of laps ranged from just 46 for Alonso up to 78 for Antonelli and Tsunoda.
The times in Formula 1 testing do not mean much, but for what it’s worth the first morning had the top nine covered by just seven-tenths. Bearman was four seconds off the ultimate pace, but Haas were running a different programme to everyone else, focusing on high fuel running, so that time doesn’t reflect their actual pace.
It was Antonelli who topped the F1 testing time sheets in the morning, with Lawson, Albon, and Tsunoda all between one- and two-tenths off the Mercedes’ pace. Hamilton, Doohan, and Alonso were all between four- and five-tenths off the pace.
There was a weird red flag halfway through the afternoon session of day one of F1 testing, with the circuit suffering a power cut. Just over an hour later the power was back, but obviously this disrupted running plans. There’s only four hours in each morning and afternoon session, so this was less than ideal. Because of this, the session was extended by one hour, finishing at 8pm local time.
We also saw something unusual in Bahrain towards the end of the afternoon session: rain. It was light enough not to need intermediate tyres, which was lucky for the teams that didn’t have any. Only Haas and Aston Martin had brought tyres suitable for wet conditions.
No team had a serious problem. Drivers didn’t crash, engines did not explode. Approaches varied, with Haas focusing on race running on higher fuel loads, for example, and everybody got in a decent number of laps on day one of testing. Medium and hard tyres were the order of the day, as these last longer and make it easier to do long runs and gather more data. This included running under the floodlights at the same time of day as the Bahrain Grand Prix.
Late on there was a minor problem for Russell, who stopped in the pit lane, but he was able to get his Mercedes moving.
Quick note that the afternoon times were faster, largely due to a mix of track evolution and cooler temperatures. Because of this, Antonelli’s time, fastest in the morning, ended up only 7th on the full day time sheet. Top dog was Norris, a tenth ahead of Russell and two-tenths ahead of Verstappen. Leclerc was 4th, two-tenths further back, and a tenth ahead of his former team mate Sainz. It was a full four-tenths from the Spaniard to Gasly and Antonelli. After him were fellow morning runners Lawson, Albon, and Tsunoda.
When it comes to laps completed Haas had the most at 160, almost twice as many as Aston Martin, who ran just 88 laps.
Formula 1 Testing Day 2 13mins 47s
For day 2 most teams took the same approach as for day 1, splitting the morning and afternoon sessions between their drivers. Williams and Red Bull each opted for one driver only, with Sainz and Lawson having the whole of day 2 for themselves.
Day 2 also started with some light rain, not enough for wets but indicative of how unusually cool this F1 testing session was. It did get heavy enough to reduce the grip available and led to drivers spending a little time in their garages.
Around an hour and 40 minutes into the session Ocon went out with intermediates on his Haas, but not for long as the track was not exactly soaked.
Piastri and Hulkenberg made minor contact, leading both to return to the garage but neither suffered any significant loss of running.
The morning session of day 2 of F1 testing also saw Red Bull suffer a reliability failure, a water pressure problem which consigned their car to the garage. Not the end of the world, but they’ll be hoping it’s a one-off.
Hamilton topped the morning session time sheets, four-tenths ahead of his former team mate Russell. Sainz was fast again for Williams, three-tenths further back, with a similar margin to Gasly and again to Alonso. Tsunoda and Piastri were both a tenth off Alonso, with Lawson another four-tenths behind. Hulkenberg was two-tenths off Lawson and two seconds off Hamilton’s leading pace, with Ocon another 1.6 seconds slower. However, much the same happened yesterday so there’s probably no need to panic if you’re a Haas fan.
There was more rain in the afternoon, which was not something I expected to be writing about F1 testing in Bahrain.
Another similarity to the morning session of this F1 testing day was Sainz doing another long run. Bearman’s running in the afternoon was compromised a little by floor repairs.
The top four might only be separated by a tiny margin, perhaps a tenth or two. At least, that’s what people are guessing.
Sainz put together 127 laps, and Norris’ race runs looked very tasty indeed. However, testing does allow for engine modes, tyres, and so on to hide true pace so these are little pointers rather than firm evidence. Similarly, Sainz was the fastest man during the second day of F1 testing this year, but it’s near certain his Williams had the engine turned up a little more than the others or was running lower fuel.
While Carlos Sainz was fastest both Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc were within a tenth of a second, with Russell and Antonelli both four-tenths off the ultimate pace. The tightness of the results there suggest the drivers were pushing within the confines of their testing programme, but does not necessarily reflect how fast they’ll actually be come qualifying at the Australian Grand Prix in a fortnight. Stroll, Lawson, Doohan, and Gasly were all between eight-tenths and 1.1 seconds off Sainz, with Hadjar and Alonso 1.3 seconds away.
Haas, again, were bottom of the time sheet with Bearman slowest and 5 seconds behind Sainz but this was very much high fuel running. This makes it nigh on impossible to guess where Haas will end up being. Likewise, McLaren’s 13th and 14th should not be seen as indicative of their actual pace. This is backed up by the fastest sectors info, which has Sainz quickest in the first and third sectors while Norris was fastest in sector 2, showing the McLaren was pulling its punches.
In race simulations, it looked like Norris’ McLaren was fastest by a large margin, ahead of a closely matched Leclerc’s Ferrari and Antonelli’s Mercedes, with Lawson’s Red Bull a bit further back. However, there’s a huge range of variation possible as mentioned earlier, and Verstappen wasn’t driving. If Red Bull mount a title challenge it’ll be the Dutchman leading it.
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F1 Testing 2025 Day 3 17mins 52s
And so we come to the final day of F1 testing in 2025, the last chance Formula 1 teams have to try and refine their setups, identify weak spots, and get the most from their cars before the season proper starts. For most teams the day was split between their drivers, while Red Bull and Williams had Verstappen and Albon in for the entire day, following day 2 being dedicated to Lawson and Sainz.
That was the plan, anyway. Aston Martin said Stroll was feeling ill so Alonso took over for the morning session, with the plan to have Stroll take the afternoon.
Only about half an hour into the morning session Bearman’s engine cover blew open, one of the few reliability problems we’ve seen during these three days of F1 testing. This brought out a yellow flag for debris to be collected.
The last day of testing also saw the sun make an appearance and temperatures increase a little, which will be useful for every team given the oddly cool temperatures of the first two days. By way of comparison, track temperature was 33 degrees Celsius compared to just 15 the day before. In addition to more sun we saw more wind, which made driving a bit trickier.
Red Bull unveiled a new nose for their car during this session. I wouldn’t be surprised to see new parts on various cars between now and the Australian Grand Prix. The nose is pretty similar but set one element further back than the initial version which went all the way to the edge of the front wing.
There was a brief red flag late on due to broken glass from a broken window in the starters box. Luckily the debris was swept up quickly so it didn’t waste much time.
In the morning session Charles Leclerc posted the fastest time, less than a tenth ahead of Antonelli. Norris was six-hundredths further back, while Verstappen was almost four-tenths behind Leclerc and only a few hundredths ahead of Doohan. There were larger gaps back to Albon, Hadjar, Alonso, Bortoleto, and Bearman.
The afternoon session on the final day of F1 testing had a red flag early on. Bizarrely, this occurred due to a bus being on the track. The Bahrain test this year has had a strange number of unusual red flags, with a power cut, broken window, and now a bus.
Also, while Stroll did some driving in the afternoon it wasn’t long before he was feeling unwell enough to let Alonso take over.
Lewis Hamilton didn’t have it that bad, but his aim was to complete a race simulation run and he only managed to get in 47 laps. Not a disaster but not quite what he or Ferrari wanted.
This contrasts quite sharply with Ocon, who achieved 100 laps in day 3’s afternoon session. Haas have had high lap numbers during the test, although their different approach makes it even harder to assess their pace than that of other teams.
Russell ended up with the fastest time on day 3 of F1 testing, two-hundredths ahead of Verstappen. Albon was third for Williams, just a tenth off Russell. Piastri was three-tenths further back, and Gasly another tenth slower. Hamilton was sixth, eight-tenths off the ultimate pace, ahead of Tsunoda, Ocon, Leclerc, and Antonelli.
Summary of F1 2025 Testing 21mins 41s
Now testing is done for Formula 1 in 2025, how do things stand?
During day 2 a consensus started to emerge that things were going to be very close, which may bode well for the season. McLaren and Ferrari both seem to be in good shape, perhaps suggesting Ferrari will win in Australia as they’ve won four of the last six races there.
On pure pace, it seems McLaren may be the best of a very tight top four, the others being Ferrari, Red Bull, and Mercedes. Williams appear to have improved from last year, but just how much remains an open question. Haas got in plenty of laps and didn’t bother trying to do much with low fuel, which may serve them well.
For Ferrari, Hamilton seems very ready for the first race, with Leclerc suggesting there were one or two areas to improve.
Aston Martin could’ve got in some more running, particularly Stroll. Being ill can’t be avoided, of course, but it’s not ideal. Interestingly, they didn’t have the fewest laps. Aston Martin had 306, with Red Bull only clocking 304, the smallest number of laps for any team.
At the top end Mercedes was just ahead of Haas, with 458 laps versus 457. Racing Bulls had 454. For the sake of completion the other figures are Alpine on 405 laps, Williams on 395, Ferrari on 382, McLaren on 381, and Sauber on 354.
Slightly interesting that only Mercedes of the fastest teams was in the top half when it comes to laps.
My guess is that we are going to have a McLaren-Ferrari duel for the constructors. The drivers’ title might see action from Russell and Verstappen in addition to McLaren and Ferrari drivers.
I’m sticking with my earlier prediction that Williams will do better and Aston Martin worse than last season, but how the battle to be best of the rest will go is anyone’s guess.
How the Betting Odds have Changed 24mins 01s
Before testing I had a look at the betting odds over at Ladbrokes to see how the drivers and teams stacked up. As a quick reminder, the favourites for the drivers’ title were Norris at 3, Verstappen at 3.5, and Leclerc at 5. The constructors’ title was reckoned to be a two horse race between McLaren at 2.1 and Ferrari at 2.2.
Naturally, testing provides some measure of guidance to how the teams have done with their new car designs. As far as the markets go, the odds have shifted.
The top three have identical odds with Ladbrokes, although Piastri’s have shortened from 10 to 8.5, suggesting some confidence towards McLaren.
If we look at Betfair’s exchange, which is more reactive, Norris’ odds have shortened and Verstappen’s lengthened. Piastri has gone a bit shorter but remains less likely than either Ferrari driver to win the title. In summary, more people now believe Norris is a clearer favourite, and Verstappen is only slightly shorter odds than Leclerc now.
At Ladbrokes, the constructors’ odds are unchanged with McLaren favourites on 2.1 and Ferrari close behind on 2.2.
As always, odds can change rapidly. These numbers were correct when I checked on Friday, right after testing concluded.
A quick reminder that Tuesdays are when I plan to put up both post-race reviews and pre-race predictions and previews. For races that are on consecutive weekends this means I’ll be putting up longer episodes that combine both. We’ll see how that works and I’ll amend things if need be.
Thank you for listening. I think we’re all ready for the F1 2025 season to finally start. Next up, to be released on the 11th of March, is a look ahead to the first race of the season: the Australian Grand Prix.
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