Pre-season testing in Bahrain has been one of the most difficult to interpret due to the challenging track and environmental conditions the teams have faced.

However, one of the most interesting metrics that the teams have been able to obtain is the top speed with different wing settings and setup configurations.

McLaren saving its power for Melbourne

The recently finished pre-season testing has left us with many unknowns. The biggest and most important is perhaps the teams’ true performance in one-lap pace.

Few dared to push their engines and discarded the option to use Pirelli’s softest compounds in the unrepresentative conditions they encountered at the Sakhir circuit.

Nevertheless, we can still view the top speeds we have seen in the fastest laps of this pre-season and compare them with those achieved last season in qualifying and also in the 2024 test.

As we can see, McLaren was one of the teams that least pushed their Mercedes engine in Bahrain. Despite showing great pace in race simulation, the Woking-based team is saving all its power for the first qualifying in Australia.

It is also interesting to see Carlos Sainz in 12th place on this list despite being the fastest driver this pre-season. This indicates that the Spanish driver was probably pushing a bit harder than the rest in the corners of the Sakhir track, probably to find the limits of his new FW45 which seems to be one of the cars to follow closely in the first stages of this new season.

Other teams that seem to have been hiding behind McLaren in terms of speed are Aston Martin and Haas. While these teams haven’t experienced the best feeling either, they still seem to have some extra performance to unlock to be in the midfield fight.

If we now compare all these top speed values to those obtained in 2024 qualifying, we can see that all the teams still have a few kilometres per hour left to squeeze out of their engines.

Ferrari and Haas showed the biggest difference between their fastest laps in testing and qualifying in 2024 with 7 km/h less, followed by Red Bull with 6 km/h less. Mercedes is the only team to at least match their speed in 2024 qualifying at Bahrain and pre-season testing one year ago.

Looking back a year ago, we can again make a direct comparison between the top speeds of the teams on their fastest laps in pre-season 2024 compared to this year’s testing.

We can see some very interesting numbers. Mercedes and McLaren were the only teams that were slower on the main straight of the Sakhir circuit in qualifying in 2024 compared to this year’s testing. Most likely, both with a higher downforce set-up.

With respect to this year’s pre-season testing, we can see both McLaren and Red Bull running clearly slower in 2025 as well as Haas.

More numbers crunched ahead of the Australian GP

👉 F1 testing data discovery indicates true Red Bull pace compared to Ferrari, McLaren, Mercedes

👉 F1’s slowest team? What the data really shows ahead of season opener

All in all, it is clear that we still have a lot to see from all the teams. It has been a difficult pre-season for everyone, especially for the engineers who have had to evaluate the work done in the factory during the winter with less than ideal track and environmental conditions in Bahrain.

Also for those strategy engineers with the job of evaluating competitor performance: How much has each team held back? How much more performance do we have ourselves to exploit?

The race simulations have certainly given us the best tracks ahead of the real competition and we can see a similar grid order to the end of the 2024 season, but there may be surprises in the opening rounds of 2025.

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