Barcelona 'shakedown' offers first hints of F1 2026

Mercedes were pre-season favourites for 2026 long before any of the new cars ran on track, and nothing that happened in the Formula 1 'shakedown' in Spain this week has changed that.

The new Mercedes made a strong impression on rivals. The team did the most miles, and set the fastest times while the car was on the track, albeit Lewis Hamilton posted the quickest time of the week late on the final day in the Ferrari.

The seven-time champion's lap of one minute 16.348 seconds pipped George Russell's best for Mercedes, set the previous day, by 0.097 seconds. World champion Lando Norris was second fastest on the final day, and third overall, in the McLaren, 0.246secs off Hamilton.

Judging performance from pre-season testing is always fiendishly difficult because of the number of variables involved, all the more so after a week such as this.

The test was held behind closed doors, with no independent media allowed access. No official timing was released. Only very few photographs were taken, and most of those were vetted by the teams who released them.

The test was exactly how it was billed - a shakedown is motorsport terminology for giving a car a first run-out to make sure everything works.

On top of that, everything the teams were using was new - cars, engines, tyres and fuel - after the biggest regulation change in the sport's history.

Testing outright pace was very much not on the agenda for anyone. So the headline lap times meant almost nothing, not that that erases the general impression that Mercedes are in the best place at this early stage.

The test was all about learning about the new cars and, particularly, the new power-units. It was held in private because teams were scared by memories of the last time new engines were introduced, in 2014, when many suffered major reliability problems.

But those fears did not come to fruition, partly because the standards in F1 are so high these days, and partly because the technology change was not as big as last time. If anything, the engine technology, at least, is simpler.

The engines now have 50% of their total power produced by the electrical part of the hybrid engine, and will require much more energy management than ever before in F1.

But there is now only one hybrid element to the engine, albeit that it produces three times as much power, following the removal of the MGU-H, which recovered energy from the turbo and exhaust. This means lots of energy recovery, and optimising that for lap time will take plenty of learning.

Fully sustainable fuels, made from waste biomass or synthetic industrial processes, have added a new complication, as they burn differently from fossil fuel petrol.

As for the chassis, the cars have less downforce than last year, are smaller and narrower, but faster in a straight line, that speed boosted by moveable front and rear wings.

"There is a lot of excitement, not only in Ferrari but around the whole paddock," Hamilton's team-mate Charles Leclerc said.

"We have to adapt as drivers and teams to try and find ways to maximise what is our new package, especially now with this energy management that is so much more than in the past."

Teams were allowed to run on a maximum of three days of their choosing out of the five. Mercedes had not only completed all their running by Thursday, but they finished before even the end of the day.

Russell was generally positive about the new-style cars.

"It is very different," he said, "but when you wrap your head around it, it feels quite intuitive.

"From a fan perspective, there is an opportunity to see more exciting racing, and I don't think you will see potentially some of the negatives we will feel from the car in terms of the recharge, but that will evolve so much over time.

"Overall, I'm just really glad the cars are smaller now. I was a fan of the bigger cars when they came in in 2017, visually, but having driven them, they were too big, and now they just look cool."

Ferrari also ran reliably and so, most impressively, did the two Red Bull teams.

Red Bull are starting this new era of F1 with their first in-house engine, developed in conjunction with new partner Ford. Russell went on record to say how impressed he was that the car had run so trouble-free.

The biggest problem Red Bull seemed to have at the test was driver-inflicted. The team made the somewhat odd decision to run in the rain on Tuesday, something only Ferrari did as well.

New driver Isack Hadjar crashed in the afternoon in the quick final corner, having just switched from full wet tyres to intermediates. The Frenchman did enough damage that the team needed to ship in new parts, and Red Bull could not run again until Friday even if they had wanted to.

Most teams had problems of some kind or another, though.

World champions McLaren started the test late, because the car was not ready until Wednesday.

They said that was a deliberate decision to ensure they had as much design and development time as possible, and it seemed to have not affected them when Norris impressed on the first day of the car's running on Wednesday.

But McLaren's late arrival meant their flexibility was reduced, and when a fuel-system issue occurred on Thursday, they lost a lot of running time when they decided to strip the car down and ensure they fully understood the problem.

For all the concentration on reliability, teams were of course trying to glean any snippets they could about relative pace.

Alpine managing director Steve Nielsen said: "We're all looking at lap times, of course, trying to guess what fuel loads everyone has got.

"You speculate about other people's and you try to persuade yourselves you're competitive, but by the end of the Bahrain tests (in February) we will see long runs, which is where you do your calculations."

As ever at this time of year, on the record the teams were giving nothing away, emphasising they didn't - couldn't - know where they stood. And pretty much every single one uttered the word "positive" about how the test had gone for them.

Team insiders, though, say a picture did seem to emerge. Unsurprisingly, the top teams look in good shape. As far as it is possible to tell, behind Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren and Red Bull all seem to be in a similar competitive ballpark - or "within the noise of data," as people in F1 like to say.

Alpine, who finished last in 2025, seem to have made a significant step forward having switched to Mercedes customer engines. They, Racing Bulls and Haas are the midfield, it seems.

The new works Audi team, the German manufacturer having taken over Sauber and produced their own engine, were stymied by a fair few reliability problems early in the test.

And all-new Cadillac, as expected, are at the back, was the general view.

One big thing all the teams learned was that on-track running meant rapid learning and progress, because of the complexity of the new cars, and the time it takes to build up the knowledge to getting the best out of all the systems.

This may well be why the factory teams of Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull did so well, as they have the most experience of what their new engines need and how they should be run.

And this means Williams, who did not even attend the test because their car was not ready, are significantly on the back foot going to the final two tests in Bahrain because they will be effectively two weeks behind everyone else.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the test was the highly anticipated new Aston Martin.

The car arrived late - the team did not run until late on Thursday and the car stopped on track with Lance Stroll at the wheel after just four very slow laps. So effectively their test was just for one day, with Fernando Alonso in the car.

But they certainly turned heads. The first Aston Martin design led by the legendary Adrian Newey, it bore many differences from the other cars, from its wide nose with its underside bulge, through its front suspension, slim sidepods and shrink-wrapped engine cover.

This is the first car for which Aston Martin have designed their own gearbox for many years, having bought Mercedes gearboxes previously.

They have a new engine partnership with Honda. Newey joined only in March last year, and new chief technical officer Enrico Cardile, formerly of Ferrari, in August.

And they are starting work with a new wind tunnel and driver-in-the-loop simulator, about which Newey was pretty disparaging last spring.

Alonso, was second last on the time sheets, ahead only of the Cadillac of Valtteri Bottas, and more than four seconds slower than Hamilton.

But the veteran two-time champion, who could be going into his final season in F1, did manage to complete more than 60 laps, to get his team's data-gathering off to a reasonable start.

Alonso said: "Some of the teams did filming days and shakedowns in the beginning of January and then the whole weekend here in Barcelona, but for us it was the very first day.

"We had a positive one, 60-plus laps and the car is responding well. More to come.

"It was special. The first car made by Adrian, together with Honda and all these new rules. We just made it to Barcelona the past two days. Tremendous effort from everyone and looking forward to Bahrain now."