Launches are done. All 11 Formula 1 teams have (finally) run on track.
In this peculiar F1 2026 pre-season, the first of two tests in Bahrain is at the very least a step into the more serious stuff, now we’re less than a month out from the season-opening Australian Grand Prix.
The three-day test begins on Wednesday at 10am local time and is the first ‘official’ pre-season running – although we know from the Barcelona ‘shakedown week’ test that some teams are heading into it with very different objectives to others.
So what should you expect and what are we keen to learn?
Are cars evolving already?
The early nature of the January Barcelona test plus the big production challenge of getting brand new cars ready meant some teams went for deliberately early sign-offs for their launch-spec designs.
Ferrari openly talked about having a Spec A to start with, while others are notably more basic than others (like Audi or new team Cadillac). This is all with the intention of layering on more detail deeper into pre-season.
Read more: Mark Hughes on F1 2026’s key design differences
Well, there’s not actually much time to do that. We expect some teams to hold back on Australia-spec upgrades until the very last test in Bahrain as they will have wanted to maximise development time, but it will be interesting to see which cars are already evolving and by how much.
Of course, that doesn’t mean teams will be immediately copying interesting things they spotted at Barcelona because the turnaround time is too short to have reacted already – at least in terms of big, meaningful designs. – Scott Mitchell-Malm
Is the Aston Martin-Honda package close enough?
The late-arriving AMR26 was on a different schedule to anyone else at Barcelona, and didn’t run a whole lot. The laptimes were of pretty vague significance all across the pitlane in that test, but for Aston Martin that significance was a flat zero.
But that won’t be the case in Bahrain. And though testing is testing and racing is racing, we should find out pretty quickly whether the package is competitive at all, and whether the Honda engine – which didn’t get pushed on the straights at Barcelona – is potent enough as it stands.
Adrian Newey’s AMR26 chassis design is clearly extremely ambitious. But as anyone who plays grand strategy games will know, an army only moves at the speed of its slowest unit.
We should know fairly quickly if the whole thing together is close enough to where any individual design flourishes can make enough of a difference. – Valentin Khorounzhiy
First real look at the battle out front
Bahrain will be our first real look at anything, never mind the battle to be top dog! But in all seriousness we should at least begin to get a better indication of who’s nailed ground zero of this new ruleset.
I say ‘better’ because there’s bound to be some sandbagging going on. If Mercedes really does have a three-to-four-tenth advantage lurking in that new power unit, there’s no way the works team, defending world champion McLaren, or the Williams and Alpine teams are going to reveal that hand.
Trackside observations will be a big part of our offering from Bahrain testing over in The Race Members’ Club – join today and enjoy a seven-day free trial of our bonus content!
What we should get a half-decent read on is whose car looks well-balanced on track, whether any of the frontrunners are running into some early limitations – cooling, handling, stint length, tyre management etc – and perhaps who is in the best shape when it comes to all-important energy management.
Whatever performance runs on the softer compounds happen over the next three days will be useful to note, but keeping a close eye on those long runs and how the cars behave on track will be even more revealing. – Ben Anderson
Do engines really look close?
An interesting early takeaway from the first test was the notion from Mercedes and its customer team McLaren that the Ferrari and Red Bull engines look close.
This could just be a political play: being humble, for one thing, but also bigging up the notion that the playing field is quite equal given the background noise swirling about a sudden compression ratio rules clampdown that could impact Mercedes’ design.
But it could be genuine. Bahrain should give us more of a clue. It’s a second circuit, for starters, so another challenge in terms of charging the battery and managing energy deployment. Will any perceived patterns still be repeated on a very different track layout?
There is also the element of teams starting to push their packages more this week which means – while it still won’t be the complete picture – we will get closer to finding out what the engines are capable of and maybe by extension how the impression of impressive reliability from Barcelona fares when everything get turned up. – SMM
How far off is the first Cadillac car?
The novelty of an actual honest-to-goodness Cadillac F1 car is still going strong – but it could be a long first season.
My colleague Edd Straw described Cadillac’s shakedown pace, 4.6s off the test-topping Ferrari time, as “gently encouraging”. It certainly is in terms of clearing the 107% start requirement – but not, as it stands, in terms of actually fighting anyone and having any more realistic ambitions than “reliable start and finish”.
But the new team’s mileage was also on the lower end at Barcelona, as was to be expected, and Bahrain should offer a much clearer picture of just how much of the deficit it can shave off – and what it can really dream of in its first season. – VK
How much did Barcelona absence hurt Williams?
There’s enough pre-season testing this year that missing three days of warm-up running at a cold Barcelona need not be an irreversible blow, especially with two experienced, trustworthy drivers and a dependable race team around them.
The worry will be that missing Barcelona will be a symptom of something bigger at Williams. And there’ll be no better time to dispel that notion than in the Bahrain test, marking the first public appearance of the FW48 and its ambitious front suspension design (bucking the pushrod trend).
Primarily, the car just needs to do laps and laps and laps, a target which the impressive new Mercedes engine should be very accommodating to.
But you’d also hope for it to be generally in range of its expected midfield rivals in terms of laptime, at least by the end of the test. – VK
The first public test
No more ‘is it a test or just a Shakedown Week?’ No more secret testing that isn’t really secret because F1 keeps showing the world what you’re up to because it makes good ‘content’. This week is proper pre-season F1 testing as we’ve all come to know and expect.
That means the Bahrain desert, it means live timing that is readily available rather than pirated by YouTube streamers, it means a proper TV broadcasting of the final hour each day (budgets and attention spans won’t stretch to full days for this week at least, it would seem), and fans can even buy tickets to get in.
I don’t really know why you’d bother though, honestly – save your hard-earned money for an actual grand prix ticket and just let The Race fill in the gaps for you!
Testing is a mine of information and decent clues about the season to come, but a worthwhile public spectacle it really ain’t. – BA