Sky F1 will be back to wall-to-wall coverage for the final pre-season test of 2026, restoring the kind of full-day live broadcast that’s become part of the winter routine for fans — and, frankly, for a lot of people inside the paddock who use it as background noise while they work.
After it emerged last month that this week’s running at Sakhir would only be shown in a cut-down format, the broadcaster has now confirmed it will air every session live from the Bahrain International Circuit across February 18–20.
The timing matters. With Formula 1 deep into a new technical era and the pre-season programme expanded into three separate tests, the final Bahrain outing is the closest thing teams will get to a “proper” public rehearsal before the season begins. That’s where fuel loads start to tighten up, long-run patterns begin to look less like science experiments, and the first meaningful comparisons can be drawn — even if everyone continues to insist, with straight faces, that you “can’t read anything into testing”.
Sky’s decision also draws a clear line between the two Bahrain tests. The three-day session that starts tomorrow (February 11) will only have the final hour of each day shown live. That approach has left plenty of fans frustrated, given testing has been broadcast live as standard in recent seasons — particularly since the sport moved to a compact three-day pre-season format in 2023. But the calculus for broadcasters is different now: three separate tests, spread across weeks, demands more airtime and production commitment than the modern norm.
The backdrop, of course, is the expanded 2026 testing schedule itself. Last month’s five-day “Shakedown Week” in Barcelona was held behind closed doors as teams rolled out their new-regulation cars for the first time, away from the cameras. Bahrain is the first time many viewers will properly see these machines working through full programmes, with the final test next week expected to be where teams stop hiding behind cautious run plans and start chasing usable answers.
For the February 18–20 test, Sky will go live each morning from 06:50 UK time (09:50 local), before returning after the lunch break for the afternoon/evening session from 11:55 UK time (14:55 local). There’ll also be a nightly ‘testing wrap’ show at 20:00 UK.
In practice, this is the version of testing coverage that people lean on: full sessions, full context, and enough continuous running to spot the trends that short highlight windows inevitably miss — whether that’s a team quietly changing its front-wing philosophy between runs, a driver wrestling a car through a specific corner sequence, or the early indications of who’s nailed basic balance and who’s still firefighting correlation.
It’s also worth remembering that live testing coverage in recent years has typically been a shared production between Sky F1 and F1 TV crews, which has helped make the broadcast feel closer to a race weekend than the old “sporadic feed and a lap-time table” days. Next week, at least, that familiar rhythm returns.
For viewers, the appeal is obvious. For teams, it’s more complicated: the last test is where the sport starts drawing its first narratives, fairly or not. When the cameras are on all day, the smallest details get amplified. A scruffy long run, a garage delay, an odd-looking aero rake run that lasts longer than expected — it all becomes part of the conversation. But that’s 2026 testing in a nutshell: more running, more scrutiny, more noise. Sky’s full coverage means everyone will be watching the same clues at the same time.
