Lando Norris topped the times for the day in his McLaren, putting in a lap of 1:30.430s on the medium tyre, in what felt in many ways like an extension of last year’s running. But it was rookie Kimi Antonelli who led the way after the morning session in terms of time and laps completed, with 78 done in the Mercedes W16.
The most notable event of the day was a powercut in the middle of the afternoon’s running – which meant the track and garages went dark for around an hour and the action was red flagged. This hour was reinstated at the end of the day, giving the teams some extra time to complete their run plans.
Despite being in the desert, the Bahrain International Circuit was not immune to some wintery weather, and the afternoon session saw increasingly cool conditions and some rain hit towards its conclusion. It was never enough to stop the running, even though Haas and Aston Martin are the only teams with any intermediate or wet tyres in their selections.
So what did we learn from day 1?
Impressive Reliability
Perhaps it was to be expected as this is the fourth and final season of the current regulations, but reliability was incredibly impressive up and down the field. It’s not unheard of for teams to suffer problems as they get their cars up and running for the most consecutive laps they’ve done so far, but today was impacted very minimally if at all by any issues.
On testing days where it’s tough to read too much into lap times and their potential consequences for the season ahead, reliability can be a good indicator of where a team is at. In fact, all teams completed between 87 and 154 laps – almost triple a race distance in some cases – a sign of just how well these cars ran over the day. Whether this can continue over the next two days remains to be seen…
The C3 Steals the Show
As expected and as reflected in the team’s tyre selections for the 3 day test, the C3 has been the most popular tyre with the teams. It’s Pirelli’s most versatile tyre in the now six-strong compound range, hard enough for some longer runs but soft enough to deliver performance in the cooler conditions seen on track today.
According to Pirell, the C3 was used for 1017 out of the 1326 total laps completed today, or 76%. All drivers, excluding Ollie Bearman, set their fastest laps of the day on the C3 compound with Lando Norris’ time topping lap being run on a new set of this tyre.
Only the three hardest compounds were used by the teams today, reflective of the selection that will be used for the Bahrain Grand Prix in mid-April. The C2 was used for 21.04% of the laps, while the C1 was used for just 2.26%.
Aston Martin’s cooling innovation
In what was a pretty mundane day of running, Aston Martin may have delivered some innovation in their cooling setup on their AMR25, with two small, slit inlets being noticed either side of the driver’s head. The function of these beyond cooling is unknown and what they’re cooling is also unknown, but it’s the first time we’ve seen inlets in this area. That said, Red Bull did run similar halo-side inlets on their RB20 last year, and this year too as seen below.
Credit: Aston Martin F1 Media.
Haas work to their own schedule
Haas have started 2025 much as they started 2024, with a seemingly lack-lustre display of their pace. But there’s more to it than the timing sheets might suggest, as they’ve been working on heavy fuel race runs all day. This has put Ocon and Bearman at the bottom of the times, with Bearman’s fastest time being over 5 seconds slower than the fastest of the day and set on the C2, hard tyre. In total, the pair put in 160 laps with Bearman completing 72 in the morning and Ocon completing 88 in the afternoon, each across the C2 and C3 compounds.
Ayao Komatsu, Haas team principal, said they were able to complete their entire program and found some answers that they needed too, concluding that it was a “positive start to pre-season testing”.
Day two of pre-season testing gets underway on Thursday morning at 10:00am local time (7:00am GMT) and will run for the usual morning and afternoon sessions of four hours each, with a one hour break between.
The drivers for these sessions can be found here.
