Lewis Hamilton may not have topped the timing screens in Bahrain, but if you’re looking for the most telling number of the first 2026 pre-season test, it’s buried in the long-run data.
Sky F1’s Ted Kravitz reported that Hamilton completed the quickest race simulation of anyone across the three days at Sakhir — a run that, on the face of it, put Ferrari at the front of the pack when you strip away the usual testing noise. Kravitz was careful to flag the usual caveats: track evolution, differing programmes, and the fact that not everyone ran their “race” at the same time of day. Still, his conclusion was blunt. On the evidence of those stints, Ferrari look like the team to beat.
What’s raised eyebrows inside the paddock is that Ferrari didn’t just look sharp on one cherry-picked sequence. The team ran comparable race simulations on successive days — Charles Leclerc on Day 2 and Hamilton on Day 3 — and Kravitz’s read is that both were strong, with Hamilton’s stint the best of the lot.
That detail matters because it speaks to repeatability, not just a single flattering run. Testing always tempts people into overreaction, but when a car produces two credible race simulations with two different drivers, on two different days, it starts to look less like circumstance and more like a baseline.
Kravitz also pointed to a specific inflection point in Ferrari’s week: the upgrade package introduced on Day 2. New front wing, new floor, new diffuser — substantial enough changes that it’s hard not to see it as Ferrari showing its hand rather than simply ticking off correlation work. In Kravitz’s view, that package coincided with Ferrari’s jump to the top on race-simulation pace.
His verdict was emphatic: Ferrari “completed the Bahrain Grand Prix quicker than anybody else, period”.
And then came the line that will do the rounds for a while: Hamilton’s race run, Kravitz said, was quicker than Leclerc’s.
Again, the footnotes are important. Hamilton’s stint came on a more rubbered-in track, which always flatters lap time, though Kravitz noted it was run at the same time of day — an attempt to keep at least one variable constant. But even allowing for evolution, it’s the sort of nugget that lands with extra weight given it’s still early days in one of F1’s most scrutinised driver-team pairings.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella offered a more measured, but still significant, external endorsement of what the long-run numbers suggested. Speaking after the sessions, Stella said Ferrari’s race pace “looks pretty competitive” in the Hamilton simulation run, and he placed Ferrari and Mercedes at the top of his early pecking order.
Stella also provided an interesting comparison point, noting that Mercedes rookie Kimi Antonelli and Hamilton both looked quicker than McLaren in race-simulation trim on the day he was speaking, when he “look[ed] at the times”. He added that Leclerc’s race run on the previous day looked similarly competitive — effectively backing up the idea that Ferrari’s form wasn’t isolated to one driver or one set of conditions.
“I just invite everyone to just be careful looking too much into what we see in testing,” Stella cautioned, before conceding that the early indications “definitely put Ferrari and Mercedes at the top of the list” in terms of readiness and performance.
That Mercedes mention is worth underlining. This hasn’t been a one-team story, even if Ferrari have grabbed the spotlight. Sky’s Craig Slater framed it as a change from the narrative that had emerged after Barcelona testing, where Mercedes had been viewed as the early “top dog”. Bahrain, at least on race sims, appears to have nudged the balance.
For Ferrari, the intrigue now is less about whether the SF-26 is quick — it’s about what kind of quick it is. Testing can flatter cars that are gentle on tyres, stable under load, and kind over long stints, even if they’re not spectacular on a single lap. Race simulation pace tends to be harder to fake because it bakes in degradation and consistency. If Ferrari really have found a platform that lets them run strong stint averages without drama, that’s exactly the sort of foundation you want heading into a new season.
For Hamilton, there’s a quieter significance too. A faster race simulation than Leclerc’s, however conditional, is the kind of early confidence-builder that drivers notice — especially when the car underneath them has just taken a sizeable aerodynamic step.
Nobody sensible will hand out trophies in February. But when rival team bosses are openly pointing to your long-run pace, and the most experienced driver on the grid has just put in the stand-out “race” of the test, it’s fair to say Ferrari have walked out of Bahrain looking like more than just a good headline. They’ve looked prepared.
