Bahrain testing has a habit of telling half-truths, and with Formula 1’s 2026 reset it’s arguably even more misleading. The lap times look encouraging — the quickest effort across the three days ended up only 2.6s off last year’s best in Sakhir, with tyre differences stretching that to a touch over three — but the more revealing story sits underneath the stopwatch: these cars are still being driven like prototypes.
Alex Albon came away from his first proper mileage in the new Williams convinced the performance ceiling is nowhere near being reached. Not in the “we’ll find a tenth here and there” sense, either. He’s talking about big chunks of laptime being locked up in the messy interface between driver, power unit and the new active aero philosophy.
“I think there’s still a lot to learn,” Albon said after the test. He admitted he couldn’t directly compare the earliest running because he missed the first week, but the direction of travel was obvious. “There’s still clearly a lot of lap time to be gained in drivability, gear shifts, and driving as well.
“It’s not close to where it was last year in terms of that feeling, but it’s getting there… it will be improved quickly throughout the season.”
That “feeling” is what a few in the paddock keep circling back to. The 2026 package is a double hit: active aerodynamics arriving alongside an engine formula that swings the balance to something close to a 50/50 split between internal combustion and electrical power. The prize is efficiency and a different kind of performance; the cost, at least right now, is that drivers are being asked to do things they’ve spent their entire careers training themselves not to do.
Energy management isn’t new in modern F1, but the early 2026 cars are widely described as energy-starved, meaning harvesting and deployment are no longer just background optimisation — they’re a primary limiter of pace. That’s why you’re hearing drivers talk about downshifting on the straights and leaning harder into lift-and-coast than they’d ever consider “normal” in a qualifying simulation. It’s why race runs can look oddly conservative even when fuel loads aren’t the whole explanation.
Albon’s point was that this isn’t a fixed characteristic of the regulations so much as a reflection of where everyone is on the learning curve. Better calibration, better tools for managing deployment, better drivability maps and — crucially — better integration between what the car wants and what the driver can actually repeat lap after lap should bring the lap time without demanding quite so much theatre behind the wheel.
George Russell, never one to indulge the more dramatic takes, struck a similar note about the speed of progress. There had been “heat” after earlier running, he suggested, but it was premature.
“There has been a lot of progression, to be honest,” Russell said. “Every day you face a new set of regulations, you face challenges that you weren’t anticipating, and the rate of improvement is very steep in those early days.
“This test has been a much smoother test for everyone… if you actually look at the lap times on some of the race runs, the cars aren’t actually a million miles away from the lap times we were seeing 12 months ago… I think, on the whole, people are a bit happier this week.”
That’s an interesting choice of phrase — “happier” rather than “faster” — and it fits what Bahrain sounded like in the background. The first phase of any new era is as much about removing the nasty surprises as it is about unlocking outright pace. Teams want the platform to behave, drivers want the car to respond consistently, and only then do you start pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with setup and style.
Oscar Piastri, speaking in the press conference on the final day, was a little less bullish about how quickly the “weird” bits will disappear. He acknowledged the steps forward, but he didn’t pretend it’s close to comfortable yet.
“It’s definitely been a learning curve,” Piastri said. “There are still some things that we need to do as drivers that are certainly very different from what we had to do last year.
“I think… we’re getting our heads around the new things we need to do, and, as teams, making accommodations for having to drive a certain way now. So I think it has improved; it still is very different from what we had before… Let’s see what Melbourne’s like.”
That last line is doing a lot of work. Testing is one thing; a race weekend with parc fermé, traffic, disrupted sessions and an actual competitive order is where “technique” turns into “pressure”. If drivers are still having to manage energy in ways that feel counterintuitive, doing it while attacking in qualifying or defending in the race is a different challenge entirely.
Alpine’s Franco Colapinto echoed the idea that the trend line is steep enough to be felt day-to-day, but he also hinted at the obvious consequence: adaptation won’t be complete by the time the championship begins.
“It feels different from last year, but… the progress is very, very steep,” Colapinto said. “From one day to another, things change, and the car is getting quicker, and it’s feeling better.
“So I think, in a few races, we will feel even better than nowadays… It’s too early to compare too much to last year, but it’s definitely improving.”
Put all that together and Bahrain’s clearest message isn’t that 2026 will be slower, or that drivers are doomed to spend the year short-shifting and coasting like it’s economy mode. It’s that the performance is there — everyone can sense it — but right now it’s trapped behind software, procedures and confidence.
And that tends to be when the biggest jumps come. Not from one upgrade package, but from teams simply learning how to make the car do what it was designed to do, without asking the driver to perform small acts of self-sabotage to get the lap time out of it.
Melbourne will give us the first proper read on who’s already figured that out — and who’s still searching for “creature comforts” while the clock keeps ticking.
