Barcelona’s third morning of running finally looked like the sort of session teams were hoping for when they booked the shakedown: sunshine, a busy pitlane, and enough laps going on to hint that the early “systems check” phase is already giving way to something more revealing.
The headline moment, inevitably, was McLaren’s first appearance of the event. Lando Norris rolled out in the MCL40 wearing the number 1 for the first time in his career, the reigning world champion doing his first public kilometres of 2026 in a black test livery. Even by modern pre-season standards it still lands differently when the champion’s car hits the track for the first time — not because the stopwatch means anything yet, but because it’s the first chance to see how a title-winning operation has interpreted a new set of rules in the cold light of day.
McLaren’s work was cautious and controlled. Norris was sent out for short one- and two-lap stints, dipping back into the garage regularly as the team ticked through early checks. That rhythm is usually telling: it’s not lap-count bravado, it’s engineers wanting clean data points, repeatability, and quick looks at how the car behaves across a couple of defined conditions before they open the taps later in the week.
The wider story of the morning, though, was that the “new era” reliability curve is already making itself felt. For Audi, there was another interruption to a programme that has struggled to stay clean since the cars first hit the track. Nico Hülkenberg stopped between Turns 9 and 10, bringing out the red flag and forcing a recovery back to the garage. It’s an awkward look when you’re trying to build momentum and confidence so early, particularly after Audi’s first day had already been compromised by a technical issue for Gabriel Bortoleto. These are still shakedown days, yes, but shakedown days are exactly when teams want to rack up easy mileage and confirm the basics are robust before they move on to the finer work.
Audi had at least been among the teams using aero rakes on track — as Red Bull reportedly did a day earlier — which is usually a sign the programme has progressed past simple installation checks and into correlation and validation. But rakes don’t help you if you’re stuck on a flatbed, and by the end of the morning Audi’s lap count painted a stark picture: just five laps logged, with time slipping away in a three-day window.
Haas also helped keep the recovery truck busy. Oliver Bearman came to a halt and triggered another red flag, the session briefly stuttering again before the circuit returned to green. Two stoppages in one morning is never what the organisers want, but it’s very much what these early runs can look like in the first weeks of a regulation cycle. Everyone is finding their weak points in real time, and not always in the privacy of the factory dyno.
Mercedes, by contrast, looked like a team intent on banking mileage and getting into a proper working cadence. George Russell was out early and stayed out often, piling on laps in the W17 and ending the morning with a lap count north of 70. That’s the sort of volume engineers crave at this stage: enough running to let the driver settle, enough repetition to start isolating car behaviour, and enough consistency to allow meaningful comparisons between runs.
There was also the inevitable paddock murmur around the Mercedes power unit. Unofficial talk suggested Mercedes were beginning to “crank up” the new engine — a phrase that gets thrown around loosely at this time of year, but in context it fits with what Mercedes appeared to be doing: long, steady sequences, the kind you run when you’re comfortable the car will keep circulating and you’re ready to start leaning into performance validation rather than mere survival.
Alpine quietly put together one of the more eye-catching mornings. Franco Colapinto, with no reported interruptions, was said to be quickest at the 90-minute mark with a 1:21.897 and later improved the benchmark to a 1:19.150 on softs as the session headed towards its close. Anyone getting carried away with headline times in Barcelona at this stage will be missing the point — fuel loads, run plans and tyre usage mean the order is mostly noise — but clean running always has value, and Alpine’s programme sounded like it was built around longer runs, much like Mercedes.
One notable absence was Red Bull. After Isack Hadjar’s crash late on day two, team boss Laurent Mekies said the squad would “try our best to repair the car”, but with only a single day left to run he also made clear they’d need to “play that card carefully”. In other words: if you’ve got limited track time, you don’t burn it just to say you ran; you run when you can learn.
That’s the undercurrent in Barcelona so far. The teams that get to the end of the week with big lap numbers aren’t just flexing reliability — they’re buying themselves time to ask better questions. The teams that spend mornings watching the recovery truck are still stuck on the basics.
And in that context, Norris’ first laps as world champion felt less like theatre and more like a marker. McLaren didn’t look like a team chasing headlines. It looked like one getting to work.
