Formula 1 2020 Season Thread

Winter Testing

This week and next, the teams will be testing their 2020 cars at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya. This will be their first opportunity to evaluate the performance of the cars and gather data to help them set the cars up for the races yet to come.

The big talking point early in the testing is Mercedes' new DAS system. Details are few but the system appears to change the toe-in of the front suspension during cornering. Personally I don't see how such a system is legal but I admit I'm no expert on the technical regulations. More here.

Something must be working for them as Bottas and Hamilton were 1-2 in yesterdays testing. They managed 173 laps between the two of them. They're obviously the team to beat again this year.

Racing Point - in particular Sergio Perez - look to be quite fast in the early going and are making a push to be the best of the rest. In fact Perez has been quickest so far in today's runs.

Max Verstappen of Red Bull was also in the mix yesterday, only a half second back from the Mercs.

Ferrari are quite far back (over a second) at this point. But they claim that they're not really pushing for speed yet. They're trying to correlate their on-track findings with the CFD and wind tunnel results. If you recall last year, Ferrari came out swinging and were much quicker than everybody else. Then they failed to back it up come race time. So maybe this is a new approach.

Haas are near the back of the pack. Like Ferrari they struggled to get the car setup in race trim last year. The Ferrari muscle was effective in qualifying but they couldn't get the tires working during the race. I'm hoping they learned from that and will have a better year.

I'm happy to see Williams showing better pace this year so far. I really felt for them last year and hopefully they will begin to rebound.

Kvyat in the newly-branded Alpha Tauri (formerly Toro Rosso) was right behind Max so maybe Honda has truly got on top of their engine issues from a few seasons ago. Renault and McLaren were behind Dani in the middle of the pack.

Should be interesting to see how it all shakes out. You can't read too much into these early results. A lot will change between now and Melbourne. Nevertheless it's nice to see some laps turned in (semi)anger.

Next Race - Australian Grand Prix, March 12-15 Melbourne Grand Prix Circuit (discussion starts on page 4)