Will F1 2023 be a snoozefest? 

Where the sport has dramatically changed from then are the restrictions on testing and the budget cap. Back in that era, Ferrari could have a car running around its tracks at Fiorano or Mugello from dawn till dusk, four days a week as it looked for solutions to close the gap to its rivals. This, of course, was manna from heaven for the engineers but a nightmare for the finance department as the team just haemorrhaged cash day after day in the quest for performance. Simulators and simulation tools have improved a great deal of course, which means that in-season progress should still be possible, at a fraction of the cost of on-track testing.

Fast forward to last year, and Ferrari struggled with straight-line speed against Red Bull. There were occasions like in Miami and Canada where the Ferraris seemed faster across the lap but their drivers just couldn’t overtake Max even with the benefit of DRS. For 2023 the team has obviously pursued a philosophy of reducing the amount of drag while making do with less downforce – it hasn’t quite been able to achieve the same trade-off as its rival in blue. This means that whilst in qualifying the drivers could hang on to an edgy car and drag a single lap time out, over a race distance they had no chance. Charles Leclerc was 24 seconds behind Verstappen when his engine shut down after 40 laps – an enormous deficit of 0.6sec per lap.

Now, if we want to be optimistic for the year ahead, we could look at the fact that the track in Bahrain highlighted Ferrari’s weaknesses. With a coarse surface and five major traction zones, the rear tyres take more of a pounding around that circuit than anywhere else on the calendar, thereby exposing Ferrari’s race pace woes. The next four races are all on street circuits which are much kinder to the tyres. If the Ferraris get hammered for pure pace on those tracks, then it’s a really big problem.

Mind you, having an engine shut down at the opening race of the season is never a good sign when they’re supposed to be doing at least seven events. The teams all have full car ‘super dynos’ on which they are able to run the entire car for thousands of kilometres and simulate all of the stresses and loads of full Grand Prix weekends, which makes the disappointment of Leclerc’s failure even more worrying.

The Mercedes situation is a bigger concern, I think. Last year, the team talked about untapped potential in its concept and in general seemed frustrated about the fact it could see all of this downforce in the wind tunnel, but it couldn’t use it because of the bouncing issue. The W14 launch was the most eagerly awaited one this winter and, crucially, Mercedes stuck with the base concept from last season. Based on the evidence of the first weekend, and it was only the first weekend, the gap to pole position is about the same as last year. More worryingly, Lewis Hamilton finished 50 seconds behind Max, who was just cruising for the last 20 laps of that race.

As much as the next four races will tell us where Ferrari really is relative to Red Bull, it will also be the crucial window where the Brackley team will need to decide in what direction to take its 2024 concept.

Here’s my analogy – stick with me! Imagine that a four-year rule cycle is a bit like a four-storey apartment block. The power units are the building’s foundations. The teams have now all built the structure of the first two floors and are currently doing some internal decorating of the second floor whilst planning the third. Mercedes needs to decide if it must knock down the entire structure and build three floors in one year that are of the same quality as Red Bull’s, while Red Bull simply needs to add another floor on top for 2024.

That’s a big decision to make and Toto Wolff’s public remarks after the race on Sunday – he basically said the current car concept would never be a winner – would have ramped the pressure up internally on a group of designers whose confidence would already have been shaken from the past 12 months.

(Where exactly has Mercedes gone wrong? Look out for an in-depth piece by Edd Straw very soon.)

We only need to wind the clock back to this time last year when Aston Martin had both cars knocked out of Q1 in Bahrain. Two months later at the Spanish Grand Prix it wheeled out a car that looked remarkably like a Red Bull, upsetting the folks in Milton Keynes, but I have to say I admired the way the team went about pivoting its entire concept in such a short space of time.

It took Aston a chunk of time to understand how to unlock the inherent performance of its B-spec car, but by the end of the season it had understood the baseline and could build on it. To admit that you got the concept wrong and tear up a lot of your hard work also means putting your ego aside. It was a big and bold move for a team to make, especially in a cost cap era, and I’ll be fascinated to see what Mercedes does over the next few months.

Red Bull and Aston Martin have done a brilliant job to kick start this season strongly and they deserve a lot of respect for that. Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren all under-delivered in Bahrain against their own expectations and for the sake of all the neutrals like us watching, let’s hope they can dig themselves out of their respective holes very soon.