First trackside impressions from F1 testing

Scott Mitchell-Malm has been trackside for us in Bahrain this morning for the first hours of F1 testing. Here are his first impressions - exclusively for The Race Members' Club on Patreon.

I've just had my first stint trackside of testing having spent almost the first 90 minutes of testing out at Turn 10.

It’s always illuminating, although I must admit, the first few laps that you're out there, the first few minutes, there's definitely a feeling of ‘Am I actually seeing anything? Oh, my God, I don't know anything, this is absolutely worthless’ - because you have no data to work from. You're building up from nothing. But as the laps tick by and as more of the same car comes through, you start to notice trends of what each individual car is doing.

You also get a sense of what most of the cars are doing overall. So you start to see hints of one car with a little bit of entry understeer, one car where the front axle looks like it's sliding mid-corner, things like this.

And that picture builds more and more over the course of the time you are trackside and then, of course over the week itself - because we'll be going trackside several times, to different parts of the track to try to form different bits of a complete image. You're still filling in the gaps, that's just how it goes, but it's an interesting process.

So, first impressions - which are all they are, because I'm just saying what I see here, rather than trying to jump to conclusions - are cars like the Ferrari and the Red Bull actually look quite compliant.

The Mercedes looked a little bit trickier with Kimi Antonelli, he missed the apex on his first push lap both times I saw him go out for runs.

I didn't really see that from Lewis Hamilton in the Ferrari or Liam Lawson in the Red Bull. They looked just a little bit neater. But that could be that those drivers are being a little bit more reserved than Antonelli.

With Hamilton there was a little bit of experimentation with the lines through Turn 10, and he was a little less consistent than Lawson, but it got much more refined as the session went on.

A valuable and interesting first stint trackside - at least for what it is. I know Edd Straw’s out there now, watching from Turn 4, and I'll do some more viewing before the end of this first half day of running and share my thoughts from that here on Patreon as well.