2022 Barcelona Test: Key Points

The three days of testing in Barcelona provided Formula 1 drivers and teams with their first proper insight into how the 2022 cars behave on track.

Mercedes and Red Bull: Still at top in Barcelona

One of the challenges for Mercedes and Red Bull last year was dovetailing their titanic fight for both world championships with the development on the very different 2022 car.

They would also have the harshest restrictions on aerodynamic testing (covering both windtunnel time and CFD work). This seemed like the greatest potential for the two top teams to drop the ball. Or they simply be outgunned by those who had more opportunity to focus on the new rules.

But Lewis Hamilton bullishly declared this week: “My team doesn’t make mistakes. Of course, there is always a risk, but we don’t make mistakes.”

And Mercedes’ performance in the first test backed that up, with Red Bull just as impressive. This goes for the meaningful metrics like lap counts and the ones loaded with caveats like the laptimes.

“If there’s any team on the grid right now that still expects to be at the front when it matters, it’s going to be Mercedes and probably Red Bull,” reckoned McLaren’s Lando Norris.

By the time the test concluded the order read: Mercedes first, Mercedes second, Red Bull third, Red Bull fourth. Mercedes’ drivers did their times on the softest tyres. Sergio Perez and Max Verstappen one and two steps harder respectively.

Ferrari in good form

The vibe after three days of testing is that all of Ferrari’s rivals are talking up the team from Maranello, the work it has done with its car and the apparent power of its new engine.

This is a big opportunity for Ferrari. It had a decent chunk more windtunnel time permitted by the regulations in the first half of last year. And over the rest of 2021 it still had a bigger aero testing allowance than Mercedes and Red Bull.

Ferrari is happy to acknowledge this has manifested itself into a few positives with the F1-75. With lots of laps, the car’s behaving well in terms of balance and reliability, and no big issues as such.

Alpine and Alfa Romeo struggled in Barcelona

There we were at the end of day one waxing lyrical about how impressive reliability had been almost universally among the teams. No red flags and 1100-plus laps represented a pretty emphatic answer to F1’s biggest step into the unknown in a generation.

But those statistics weren’t quite repeatable, as it turned out.

Friday morning had 5 red flags. And though there were no further stoppages in the afternoon, it’s worth considering that four teams – three of which caused red flags – didn’t reappear at all, and another managed only a handful laps.

Alpine called it a day before lunch due to the effects of a hydraulic leak in the first hour – which led to a fire in the back of the car – while Fernando Alonso was driving. Haas and Aston Martin hoped to get back out but oil leaks for each put paid to those ambitions, and AlphaTauri “simply ran out of time” to repair its car after Pierre Gasly’s off in the morning.

Valtteri Bottas did get 10 laps on the board for Alfa Romeo during the first hour or so of afternoon running, but that was its lot. And when you consider that was all on the intermediate tyre, during the period when the track had been artificially soaked, it adds up to no meaningful running.

The ‘porpoising’ effect

In Barcelona, all teams suffered to a greater or lesser extent from porpoising or bouncing at high speed on the pit straight.

Teams thus spent much of the three-day test looking for ways to control it through ride height or aero adjustments.

This seems to be an integral part of the 2022 car concept.

Thus it may take some time to fully get on top of the issue while not compromising overall performance, for example by being obliged to run the cars significantly higher than the optimum figures with which they were designed to be fully effective.

Controlling porpoising at different tracks with differing characteristics won’t necessarily be easy, and the fact that teams hadn’t anticipated the phenomenon after their long months of tunnel and CFD work indicates that they will have a lot of work to do to successfully model it and thus address it.

The new cars might be no slower at all

It’s been clear for a while that the new cars were not going to be as slow as was first suggested when the regulations were proposed way back in late 2019.

Slower times were never a stated target, rather a likely consequence of rules designed to cut downforce and reduce areas of development.

The closer we got to testing the greater the indication that actually, pretty soon these new cars wouldn’t be any slower at all.

Well now we have our first reference points. These cars produce laptime in a slightly different way as they are quicker down the straights and through the high-speed corners but worse in the slow-speed stuff.

Barcelona is a tricky comparison because F1 hasn’t tested here for two years and the last time it did, the Turn 10 hairpin was different. So let’s use last year’s qualifying because that gives us a fixed point.

Hamilton’s pole lap in 2021 was a 1m16.741s. That’s 2.4s faster than the fastest time we’ve seen this week, also set by Hamilton.

Given the grand prix would have been held in more favourable conditions, the cars were a known quantity, and everything would have been prioritised for performance, that’s a gap that the teams will eat into rapidly.

Consider that in 2019, the benchmark from the first week of pre-season testing was 1m17.393s, and became 1m15.406s in qualifying at the grand prix.

So even back then, the cars got two seconds faster by competition time.