What we learned from F1's Barcelona pre-season shakedown test

The first pre-season 'shakedown' test is firmly in the 2026 books as F1 teams prepare to crunch their data and take what learnings they can heading to Bahrain in the middle of February. 

With the talking finally over and the cars and drivers now speaking for themselves, RacingNews365 takes a look at some of the key things we learned in Barcelona about how the 2026 season could shape up.

Mercedes and Ferrari are back in the game

Simply looking at the headline times after the five days is misleading, but the Mercedes performance was dominant, even if Lewis Hamilton pipped his former team to the fastest time on the final day. 

Over the course of last season and this winter, Mercedes were touted as the favourites owing to its success with the switch to turbo hybrids in 2014, and the team didn't exactly rubbish those claims when it had the chance beyond the usual platitudes.

The W17 in the hands of George Russell and Kimi Antonelli racked up 502 laps of Barcelona across the three days, with the car reliable and fast, providing the perfect start for a team which never quite grasped the ground effect rules. 

The plan is to already move to set-up work in Bahrain as the team settles nicely into the new era, firmly putting the wilderness years behind it. 

Compression ratio, anyone?

As for Ferrari, and Hamilton in particular, this test was a crucial yardstick for his future. If the noises from Hamilton after the running were downbeat, it would just compound his misery and make an exit even likelier. 

But the Ferrari looked quick, as evidenced by Hamilton's pace-setting 1:16.348s on the final day, and was reliable. He even spoke of his love that the cars were now oversteery again. A Hamilton with his mojo back is a big plus for F1, and chiefly, Ferrari. 

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Red Bull's sigh of relief

The biggest unknown surrounding Red Bull heading into the new season was its power unit, the first-ever in-house design under the Red Bull Powertrains moniker.

Ford is bringing technical support but if the DM01 proved to be a dud, Red Bull would be faced with carrying a lump of scrap around for the first part of the season, at least before it could make changes under the FIA's ADUO safety net for PU manufacturers.

Fortunately, the only issue for both Red Bull and Racing Bulls came when Isack Hadjar crashed in the wet on Tuesday, with this not being power unit related.

The unit is reliable, has pace, and both were able to clock up a total of 622 laps of Barcelona in total - a critical advantage when fellow fresh newcomer Audi only has one team, more on that in the final section.  

The only question now is, when Red Bull turns it up, will it be enough to live with the Mercedes HPP unit?

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Aston Martin is here to play

Did you expect anything less from Adrian Newey than an extreme design which probably has every other team looking at its car compared to the AMR26, and thinking: 'How did we miss that?'

Newey has gone radical and to the very limit of the regulations, and if the AMR26 goes as fast as it looks, then the other teams have a serious problem.

The chassis is on point, but the big question mark is the Honda engine. Only a few slow laps were completed on Thursday before Fernando Alonso put the car through its paces on Friday, with the Honda completing the least number of laps of any manufacturer. 

As the team hits its stride in Bahrain next time out, stretching and pushing the limits of the power unit will be the team's biggest challenge. If it lives up to the billing of the car it is powering, El Plan could finally come together.

Audi and Cadillac at the back

Of the nine teams that completed proper running in Barcelona, discounting Aston Martin and Williams, it is safe to say that three distinct groups emerged.

In group one are Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren, and Red Bull, whilst Alpine, Haas, and Racing Bulls make up the midfield order.

That leaves Audi and Cadillac, perhaps predictably at the back, in the loosest sense of the word.

Audi completed 240 laps and Cadillac 164 as both teams encountered gremlins, of varying degrees, and roughly inverse of each other.

For Audi, coming in with its own in-house power unit, it has had to learn the established tricks of running a PU in F1 for the first time, whilst the trackside operations have been smooth given it took over Sauber.

For Cadillac, it is learning trackside operations and how to fix things which go wrong whilst having a strong Ferrari engine. 

Both were multiple seconds off the pace, but at this very early stage, the race for the so-called wooden spoon is still nowhere close to starting for real.