Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc ended the test with the single fastest lap time in an emphatic way – 0.811 seconds quicker than the next best time, set by Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli.
Headline times in testing are usually not the place to look to gauge the competitive order, but this did reflect the picture in one important way – Mercedes and Ferrari look like they are going into the new season in the best shape.
Andrea Stella, team principal of world champions McLaren, said on Friday evening: “This test has confirmed that Ferrari and Mercedes look like the teams to beat. McLaren and Red Bull [are] probably very similar, Ferrari and Mercedes a step ahead.”
This picture, an impression reflected by many other senior figures up and down the pit lane, comes less from the headline lap times – even if they did show the teams in the order Ferrari, Mercedes, McLaren, Red Bull – than the so-called race-simulation runs.
Because the teams fill up their cars with fuel and run a grand prix distance, these have far fewer variables to muddy the picture than single laps.
On Friday evening, Leclerc did the best race simulation of the week, slightly quicker than Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and McLaren’s Oscar Piastri the day before, when they set more or less exactly the same time.
Mercedes did not do any race simulations in the second week, only in the first, when track conditions were up to a second slower.
Antonelli set comfortably the fastest race simulation of the first week – a lot faster than Piastri, who was running at the same time.
And his team-mate George Russell – the bookies’ pre-season championship favourite – was also impressively quick when running in the hotter, slower conditions earlier in the day.
This is not an exact science, but the cumulation of data is what led to the conclusion reached by Stella and many others.
A complication was that McLaren were not running the latest specification of Mercedes power-unit, so can expect an uplift when they switch in Australia to the latest spec.
Another is Red Bull’s new engine is said by Russell to have the best deployment of energy, which is such an important facet this season.
Mercedes’ biggest concern is reliability. This hit Antonelli much more than Russell, but it’s probably fair to say that Mercedes suffered more problems than their major rivals, although Red Bull’s new recruit Isack Hadjar did lose a fair bit of his running to issues of one kind or another.
