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What we learned from F1's Barcelona pre-season shakedown test
The first pre-season 'shakedown' test is firmly in the 2026 books
as F1 teams prepare to crunch their data and take what learnings
they can heading to Bahrain in the middle of February. With the
talking finally over and the cars and drivers now speaking for
themselves, RacingNews365 takes a look at some of the key things we
learned in Barcelona about how the 2026 season could shape up.
Mercedes and Ferrari are back in the game Simply looking at the
headline times after the five days is misleading, but the Mercedes
performance was dominant, even if Lewis Hamilton pipped his former
team to the fastest time on the final day. Over the course of last
season and this winter, Mercedes were touted as the favourites
owing to its success with the switch to turbo hybrids in 2014, and
the team didn't exactly rubbish those claims when it had the chance
beyond the usual platitudes. The W17 in the hands of George Russell
and Kimi Antonelli racked up 502 laps of Barcelona across the three
days, with the car reliable and fast, providing the perfect start
for a team which never quite grasped the ground effect rules. The
plan is to already move to set-up work in Bahrain as the team
settles nicely into the new era, firmly putting the wilderness
years behind it. Compression ratio, anyone? As for Ferrari, and
Hamilton in particular, this test was a crucial yardstick for his
future. If the noises from Hamilton after the running were
downbeat, it would just compound his misery and make an exit even
likelier. But the Ferrari looked quick, as evidenced by Hamilton's
pace-setting 1:16.348s on the final day, and was reliable. He even
spoke of his love that the cars were now oversteery again. A
Hamilton with his mojo back is a big plus for F1, and chiefly,
Ferrari. The article continues below. Red Bull's sigh of relief
The biggest unknown surrounding Red Bull heading into the new
season was its power unit, the first-ever in-house design under the
Red Bull Powertrains moniker. Ford is bringing technical support
but if the DM01 proved to be a dud, Red Bull would be faced with
carrying a lump of scrap around for the first part of the season,
at least before it could make changes under the FIA's ADUO safety
net for PU manufacturers. Fortunately, the only issue for both Red
Bull and Racing Bulls came when Isack Hadjar crashed in the wet on
Tuesday, with this not being power unit related. The unit is
reliable, has pace, and both were able to clock up a total of 622
laps of Barcelona in total - a critical advantage when fellow fresh
newcomer Audi only has one team, more on that in the final section.
The only question now is, when Red Bull turns it up, will it be
enough to live with the Mercedes HPP unit? The article continues
below. Aston Martin is here to play Did you expect anything less
from Adrian Newey than an extreme design which probably has every
other team looking at its car compared to the AMR26, and thinking:
'How did we miss that?' Newey has gone radical and to the very
limit of the regulations, and if the AMR26 goes as fast as it
looks, then the other teams have a serious problem. The chassis is
on point, but the big question mark is the Honda engine. Only a few
slow laps were completed on Thursday before Fernando Alonso put the
car through its paces on Friday, with the Honda completing the
least number of laps of any manufacturer. As the team hits its
stride in Bahrain next time out, stretching and pushing the limits
of the power unit will be the team's biggest challenge. If it lives
up to the billing of the car it is powering, El Plan could finally
come together. Audi and Cadillac at the back Of the nine teams that
completed proper running in Barcelona, discounting Aston Martin and
Williams, it is safe to say that three distinct groups emerged. In
group one are Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren, and Red Bull, whilst
Alpine, Haas, and Racing Bulls make up the midfield order. That
leaves Audi and Cadillac, perhaps predictably at the back, in the
loosest sense of the word. Audi completed 240 laps and Cadillac 164
as both teams encountered gremlins, of varying degrees, and roughly
inverse of each other. For Audi, coming in with its own in-house
power unit, it has had to learn the established tricks of running a
PU in F1 for the first time, whilst the trackside operations have
been smooth given it took over Sauber. For Cadillac, it is learning
trackside operations and how to fix things which go wrong whilst
having a strong Ferrari engine. Both were multiple seconds off the
pace, but at this very early stage, the race for the so-called
wooden spoon is still nowhere close to starting for real.
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