Coming into the 2025 season, several F1 experts had predicted that McLaren would be the favorites and the three days of pre-season testing in Bahrain may have just confirmed that. Lando Norris not only seemed extremely quick during his qualifying runs but also in his race simulations.
McLaren’s rivals also seem to have taken note of the Briton’s blistering pace as Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said, “[Lando] Norris was on a different planet”. The Austrian made his remarks after Norris’ lap times on day two of testing were on average 0.1 seconds quicker per lap than even the Ferraris, who many believed would be McLaren’s closest challengers this year.
More importantly, Norris was also happy about how his testing panned out. “I think we’ve learned a lot from that, and getting the experience of doing the full race run was very valuable,” the 25-year-old said after the second day of testing. “Good feelings so far, we’ve now got one more day to go to make sure we end the week strongly”.
Even experts like Scott Mitchell-Malm believe that McLaren did lay down a marker during testing and would most likely be the team to beat. However, he cautioned fans that even though the MCL39 is quick, it isn’t perfect.
“McLaren has looked very good,” Mitchell-Malm said on The Race’s F1 Podcast. “I still think it’s a quick car that is an imperfect car“.
That is when his fellow expert Jonathan Noble chipped in and explained how the MCL39 is not like Red Bull’s cars from the past two seasons, in which Max Verstappen dominated the grid to secure the championship. Even though the RB20’s performance fell off the cliff in the second half of 2024, the car looked flawless during last year’s pre-season test.
Mitchell-Malm agreed on the same and added, “It was two pre-seasons in a row with Max in the Red Bull where you’re just like this thing’s just on another level”.
In a 25-race span from Miami 2023 to Imola 2024, Max Verstappen had:
• 10 straight wins (F1 record)
• 9 straight wins (previous F1 record)
• 8 straight poles (tied F1 record)What a run. pic.twitter.com/9HuO4pw4d9
— Daniel Valente ️ (@F1GuyDan) February 17, 2025
He then added that another reason why it is difficult to judge McLaren’s pre-season testing performance is the conditions in which testing took place and the various unknown variables that include different fuel loads and engine modes.
Why the Bahrain pre-season testing results could be inaccurate?
During the same podcast, Mitchell-Malm explained how the conditions during Bahrain testing were very different to how the conditions are likely to be for the first race weekend in Australia from March 14 to 16. The Race F1 journalist revealed that the conditions during testing were much cooler than usual in Bahrain when the actual race takes place.
Pirelli too acknowledged that the conditions were very unpredictable, which makes it difficult to judge the pecking order. “Formula 1 has chosen this circuit for the only pre-season test because the weather is usually very favorable,” Pirelli’s Director of Motorsport Mario Isola said.
But for the first two days, the cooler conditions threw a curveball with some rain as well. “Low temperatures, considerably lower than at this time of year in previous years, and strong wind affected the teams’ work and made it even harder than usual to interpret the results, with no previous reference points on this track at such low temperatures”, Isola added.
Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur too acknowledged that the sides will find it difficult to judge their performance during testing “as the conditions were changing quite a lot day by day and from the morning to the afternoon”. So, he believes that teams will only know where they stand when they race in Australia a couple of weeks from now.
Even though McLaren seemed to have the quickest car during pre-season testing, the first race of the season in Melbourne can still produce several surprises because testing never took place in optimum conditions.
