If Bahrain’s first proper pre-season test taught us anything, it’s that 2026 is going to reward the teams who’ve nailed their preparation — and expose the ones who haven’t. The lap charts mattered less than the subtext: who’s already in control of their new-era tools, and who’s still wrestling with fundamentals like basic energy deployment, gearbox integration, and simply keeping the car on the road long enough to learn something useful.
Williams, of all teams, walked away looking like the outfit that understood the assignment.
A week after being the story nobody at Grove wanted — missing the Barcelona shakedown and wearing the “lost time” label — Williams turned up in Bahrain and did the most effective damage limitation you’ll see all season. It logged 423 laps, more than anyone, and crucially it wasn’t mindless mileage. The FW48 ran race distances early and repeatedly, session after session, with the sort of calm, predictable behaviour engineers dream of at this stage.
Carlos Sainz said after day one the car was doing what the sim said it should, which is about as close to a love letter as an F1 driver gives in February. Alex Albon admitted they were only really starting to explore energy management and deployment on day two — a reminder that Williams is still catching up — but that’s precisely why the Bahrain response was so significant. You can’t compress learning forever, yet Williams has at least put itself back in the conversation by turning lost Barcelona running into a controlled, high-volume Bahrain programme.
At the other end of the emotional spectrum sat Aston Martin, and the difference wasn’t subtle.
The Silverstone team managed some Barcelona running, yes, but Bahrain made the scale of its task uncomfortably clear. Just 206 laps over three days — the lowest total on the grid — and the car looked more like a prototype than a product. Lance Stroll didn’t try to dress it up: engine, balance, grip… “a combination” was the refrain, and his estimate of being four to four-and-a-half seconds off the leaders was the sort of candour you normally only hear when a team’s trying to reset expectations in public.
What makes Aston Martin’s situation heavier than a simple slow test is the compounding effect of its new Honda era. With no customer teams running the same power unit, every lap it doesn’t complete is a lap Honda doesn’t get in the real world. Mercedes can lean on a four-car ecosystem for correlation and troubleshooting; Aston Martin and Honda are essentially flying as a pair, and they’ve also taken on the additional workload of running their own gearbox. That’s a lot of new plumbing to perfect while everyone else is already refining.
Fernando Alonso, typically, offered a more measured read — he suggested the gap isn’t as bleak as Stroll’s headline number, pointing to time left on the table within imperfect laps. But even he can’t hide the main point: there’s an early-season tax to be paid here, and it’s going to be paid in kilometres.
Adrian Newey’s arrival, meanwhile, isn’t a magic wand. If anything, Bahrain underlined the obvious paddock suspicion that this programme was already in motion before he could meaningfully shape it. The team has been frank about its problems, and Mike Krack has talked up “clear steps” in Honda integration, but there’s no shortcut: Aston Martin needs laps, urgently, and lots of them.
Up front, the foggier the stopwatch picture got, the louder the politics became.
Mercedes left Bahrain with the kind of “we’re fast but don’t ask us how” vibe that tends to set rivals twitching. George Russell and Kimi Antonelli ended the test as the only drivers to dip into the 1:33s on Friday, a statement even if February times are always a Rorschach test. There were reliability interruptions earlier in the week — suspension work and an engine issue bit into Antonelli’s running — and Andrew Shovlin admitted they didn’t tick every box they wanted. But the baseline looks serious.
The catch is the backdrop: the compression ratio dispute headed towards another Power Unit Advisory Committee meeting and a manufacturer vote. Toto Wolff has been unusually blunt about the stakes, warning that if the engine can’t be used as designed then Mercedes could take a performance hit and end up “screwed” if the rule interpretation shifts against them. He’s framed the gain in this grey area as just a few horsepower; Max Verstappen, never shy of pouring petrol on a paddock fire, has suggested you can add a zero to that.
If you want to know why the Mercedes camp sounded simultaneously confident and prickly in Bahrain, it’s that: they think they’ve built something strong, but they don’t know if the goalposts are about to move.
Red Bull, for its part, looked annoyingly solid — and that alone is a story given it’s running its own power unit under the Red Bull Powertrains banner. Aside from a hydraulic leak on day two, the RB22 churned through 342 laps and routinely completed race-distance work. Rival teams were already whispering about RBPT’s energy deployment down the straights, though everyone involved also smiled the tight smile you get when the sandbagging conversation starts.
Pierre Wache was careful, insisting Red Bull wasn’t the benchmark and naming McLaren, Mercedes and Ferrari as ahead — but that’s the standard early-season game. The more interesting point was his admission that, on weight, Red Bull is in a better place than it was at the start of the 2022 cycle. That’s not nothing under a brand-new rules set.
Ferrari, meanwhile, quietly did Ferrari things — in the good way. 421 laps, a tidy, efficient test, and the sort of low-drama reliability you want when you’re trying to start a new regulation era without self-inflicted wounds. Fred Vasseur even sounded like a man enjoying the lack of noise around his team, joking that it was “mega good” nobody was talking about Ferrari.
What did cut through was long-run pace. Lewis Hamilton’s Friday afternoon race simulation was noted up and down the pitlane, and McLaren’s Andrea Stella publicly acknowledged it was quicker than Oscar Piastri’s comparable work. Stella also pointed to Charles Leclerc’s Thursday run as another one that caught his eye. That’s the kind of cross-team compliment that tends not to happen unless the data is hard to ignore.
And then there’s the bigger, slightly uncomfortable takeaway: the new engine regulations are already on trial in the court of public opinion.
Drivers have been talking — some carefully, some not — about the complexity of energy management, the lift-and-coast patterns, and whether overtake mode is going to be strong enough to actually create racing rather than just create workload. Verstappen called the direction “anti-racing”; Lewis Hamilton said the excessive lift-and-coast “is not what racing is all about.” Those are heavyweight voices, and they’ve landed.
Teething problems are inevitable in year one of a five-year cycle, and it’s worth remembering how raw 2014 felt before development smoothed the edges. But perception matters, and right now the sport is going to have to prove, quickly, that 2026 can be clever without being clinical.
Away from the headline acts, the rest of the field largely got on with it. Cadillac and Audi both banked respectable daily mileage as they build their procedures and confidence, Racing Bulls and Alpine worked through minor issues while still putting in meaningful lap counts, and McLaren — reigning champions — logged over 400 laps in what Stella called an “extremely positive” test after completing its planned programme.
A pecking order is beginning to show through the camouflage: the same four teams still look like the standard setters, and the midfield doesn’t appear to have been turned upside down. The outlier, for now, is Aston Martin — not because it’s slow in February, but because it’s short on the one currency that actually buys progress at this stage.
Miles.
