What we learned from 2025 F1 pre-season testing

The time for testing is over and for the analysis to begin. 

Pre-season testing is now in the history books after just three days of running in Bahrain, with two weeks before the opening race of 2025 in Australia. 

Although some teams and drivers may feel that the 22 hours and 52 minutes of testing was too short, it was enough to provide some crucial clues about how the field is shaping here.

RacingNews365 took a look at some of the big winners here, with a losers piece set to follow tomorrow, as we explore five key things we learnt from Bahrain. 

Red Bull is in trouble

The first sign something might be up with Red Bull's RB21 came as soon as it was released, with the general feeling being: 'Is that it?'

The team promised changes were more drastic under the body, but it still looked remarkably similar to the flawed RB20 which just about crawled over the line in 2024.

Max Verstappen tried his way through a hodge-job of front-wings, rear-wings, floors, and set-up options trying to strike gold, but the best he could do was gold chocolate coin.

 Granted he did go second on the final day, but it was not an easy thing to achieve, with Liam Lawson losing time through a mechanical gremlin after the engine sprung a water leak on his full day in the car on Thursday. 

That points to a narrow operating window for the car, but the fact Red Bull new technical lead Pierre Wache is already pointing fingers at rivals' designs speaks volumes.

Newey has a lot of work to do at Aston Martin

From the new Red Bull technical lead to the old one and his new team.

Adrian Newey officially begins work at Aston as managing technical partner on Monday, and has a lot of work to do to turn the fortunes around of this team. 

Aston has not brought an upgrade that has sufficiently boosted performance since mid-2023, with most of the '24 packages ending up in the skip, leading to a major technical re-shuffle with technical director Dan Fallows, engineering chief Tom McCullough and team principal Mike Krack all no longer in the jobs they held last season. 

There was nothing abundantly wrong with the AMR25, and it does look as if the team has fixed some of the complaints of Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll, but the car just looks slow, and the team has been leap-frogged by Williams and Alpine.

Alpine finally moving in the right direction

This time last year, Alpine was in disarray. 

The car was dreadfully slow and overweight and one of F1's pukka-works outfits faced the ignominy of being last on merit in the constructors'.

But steps were made through the season, with the signing of David Sanchez from McLaren being a key part of the plan. 

Front-wing and nose upgrades made towards the end of 2024 propelled Pierre Gasly from backmarker to haul the team to sixth in the constructors', with fifth in Qatar being the standout performance, even more than his third in Brazil. 

The new machine for Gasly and Jack Doohan has looked strong, with good moves being made off-track with the signings of Julian Rouse as sporting director and Kimi Raikkonen's former Ferrari engineer Dave Greenwood as racing director. 

This is a team finally with a plan in place.

Thought you'd heard the last of flexi-wings

As pointed out in the Red Bull section, the finger-pointing has already started, with Wache highlighting the flexi rear-wings some teams appeared to be running. 

He explicitly named Ferrari and McLaren as teams with a 'mini-DRS', which was of course a McLaren 'invention' in 2024 that triggered the FIA clampdown of late last season. 

The idea is to flex the main plane of the rear-wing to try and open up a gap in the rear-wing, thus effectively creating DRS. 

It is a topic that will run and run. 

Concerns for Audi after Stake stalemate

Granted Stake had a terrible 2024 season, but any team can have an 'off season', but ever-since the ground-effect rules were brought in for 2022, this has been a team on the slide.

For Audi, it would have been looking at its huge investment, hoping for some signs of prgress forward. 

Instead, the car remains the slowest on the grid, with only Nico Hulkenberg's nouse coaxing anything regarding respectability. 

The lack of a step forward just reinforces the scale of the task Audi is facing, and even if the technical regulations are evolving for next season, showing upgrades and progress can be made is vital. 

This is a team currently not able to do that.