The key talking points at F1 2025 pre-season testing

After the razzamatazz of Formula 1’s first collective season livery launch in London last week, attention now turns to something far more meaningful: pre-season testing.

As has become traditional, the event will be staged over three days in Bahrain – kicking off at 7am UK time on Wednesday. Once again, it will be screened across the F1TV and Sky Sports platforms.

But, for the first time since 2020, Bahrain isn’t hosting the campaign’s opening round. This presents a different challenge for the teams and is one of the talking points ahead of the event.

Here’s a rundown of the big topics to follow this week.

1. Red Bull’s car handling quest

Red Bull was undoubtedly the class of the field in this event a year ago – topping the opening day by a whopping margin and being so confident in its overall pace it eschewed the closing day performance runs. But much of the team’s advantage was created with the underperformance of its rivals.

Dig a little deeper and the problems that would hurt the RB20 were already evident – with Max Verstappen off the road several times as the car’s ill-handling bit, and Sergio Perez was hitting the kind of reliability gremlins that came to be seen more regularly at Red Bull than at any of the other top squads last year.

The team has spent the winter working on the breakthrough it made in the RB20’s handling issues last year, plus trying to get on terms with its rivals in terms of possessing low-drag rear wings.

Now, it gets the chance to see how its efforts have paid off. Don’t believe the teams and drivers when they say “it’s only testing” – their software analysis of rival cars means they know pretty much where they stand even at this stage of proceedings. What happens in testing matters.

2. McLaren ending its Bahrain ‘curse’

Lando Norris, McLaren MCL38 and Oscar Piastri, McLaren MCL38

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Considering the Bahrain sovereign wealth fund owns the parent McLaren Group, the ‘home’ team has had an awful time of it at the Sakhir track in this generation of car design rules.

Back in 2022, McLaren lost Daniel Ricciardo to COVID-19 for the test’s duration and a brake issue ruined Lando Norris’s running. The next year, it logged the lowest laps of any team.

Then in 2024, having had its hopes risen by its stunning mid-2023 turnaround, it was quickly clear Ferrari had nipped back ahead and there were frustrating niggles such as the fuel system detritus that thwarted a Norris race simulation. In the opening race here for the last three years, the team’s best result was sixth – in 2024.

Although it’ll be another six weeks until F1 finds out if McLaren can do any better in the 2025 Bahrain Grand Prix as the reigning constructors’ champion squad, how the team gets on with the MCL39 in testing this week will provide a key indicator of its form.

It ended 2024 with a walk-off victory, now it needs a smooth, fast week of preparation before heading to Melbourne for the returned season opener there.

3. How the rookies fare in their new machines

Oliver Bearman, Reserve Driver, Ferrari and Haas F1 Team, Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes-AMG F1 Team, in the Paddock

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images

Famously, this time a year ago F1 was heading into a new campaign with zero movement in terms of driver line-ups. Now, rookies make up 30% of the grid – although three of them come into a rather special sub-category.

Liam Lawson, Oliver Bearman and Jack Doohan have started 11, three and one F1 race respectively – and yet still make up half of the new rookie crop by virtue of their appearances so far being as stand-ins or on temporary deals, plus they’ve never done an F1 pre-season.

But their experience at least means they have gone through the newbie nerves that bit more than fellow rookies Gabriel Bortoleto, Isack Hadjar and Andrea Kimi Antonelli. The last name is replacing Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes and as such his every lap will be closely watched.

4. How Hamilton and Ferrari fare back in the full F1 spotlight glare

Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari

Photo by: Ferrari

The same will be true of Antonelli’s predecessor: seven-time world champion Hamilton.

He’s now making his third new start in F1, but, as opposed to the nearly 5,000 miles he logged ahead of his F1 debut with McLaren in 2007 and the three, four-day pre-season tests F1 got through in 2013 when he was making his Mercedes bow, this time Hamilton has just 1.5 days to fully acclimatise with the SF-25.

Given that Fiorano filming day last week was conducted on Pirelli’s demonstration tyres – and limited in mileage anyway – this event forms his first chance to really assess how his new team and car are stacking up.

The start of the Hamilton-Ferrari alliance has been the story of 2025’s pre-season – and a strong or weak Bahrain event for either side could well turn out to headline testing, too.

5. Shock developments in the cool tech war

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes F1 W11

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Prepare for much talk about how teams are going to be carefully balancing their 2025 car development, with the need to best-hone their first challengers built under the new rules coming next year.

Midfield teams are likely to throw everything they can at this initial phase of the 2025 campaign before switching their development resource taps towards next year after just a few races. So, expect plenty of changes to launch-car specifications to arrive with the teams in the desert.

But there’s also a lesson in recent F1 history that could well be pertinent this week. Although the lack of aerodynamic rule changes mean the designs currently being unveiled are evolutions of the cars that ended 2024, it was a similar story back in 2020.

And there Mercedes stunned the Barcelona paddock (which hosted testing, twice, back then) by unleashing the dual-axis steering system…

Anything like a DAS repeat would be quite a shock, however, so it’s worth watching the onboard coverage and paying attention to speed track figures to catch a glimpse of what’s happening on the flexi-wing front.

This is set to be further clamped down at the 2025 Spanish Grand Prix – miles into the campaign – and will be something team personnel are commenting on extensively this week.

6. Mercedes finally breaks cover

George Russell, Mercedes, Toto Wolff, Team Principal and CEO, Mercedes-AMG, Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes

Photo by: Getty Images

This one is actually something that’ll happen the days before testing starts, with Mercedes set to complete a filming day on 24 February at the Bahrain track. Aston Martin will also be getting Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll out in the AMR25 for the same reason at the same time.

This is a break with how Mercedes has prepared for a new season in recent years, when it has staged the same day at Silverstone. But, having been thwarted by poor designs and poor weather since 2022, the team has opted to do things a bit differently this time around.

For both Mercedes and Aston, the filming day means they can both complete the early installation work that usually dominates the opening morning of testing.

7. Testing being more important this time around

All drivers and cars

Photo by: Getty Images

As usual, expect the teams to line-up their new challengers and drivers on the grid for the promotional shots of the new season of Netflix’s Drive to Survive ahead of the pitlane opening for the first time on Wednesday. And, because car running trumps all, many of them will be sprouting the aero load-measuring rakes to be used on the opening morning as the photographers and videographers get in position.

But it’s not just Mercedes and Aston that will be looking to crack on with their work this week. Because, as the cars won’t be left in the Sakhir paddock until FP1 starts for the opening round this time around, the teams are going to need to squeeze in as many laps as possible for their engineers to pore over even quicker – to confirm or address anything of interest before everything gets sent on to Melbourne.

After all, the season-opener switch means they don’t have the extra week of work before returning to the same track to use said data immediately.

As Racing Bulls’ team principal Laurent Mekies put it at F175 Live, “it’s perhaps a bit more tricky than [when] you just test and race immediately the week after”, so F1 fans should be treated to more laps this week than was the case last year.