After F1 testing, McLaren is the clear team to beat going into the new season
Following its rise to winning the constructors' title last year and the constant threat that Lando Norris was able to pose to Max Verstappen through the second half of last season, the team had a target on its back going into 2025.
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And judging by its performance through three days of preseason testing in Bahrain, McLaren will venture to Australia in two weeks as the team to beat for what is anticipated to be one of the closest seasons in recent F1 history.
McLaren's rate of development in the past two years has been astonishing. Its run of upgrades that started midway through 2023 in Austria took it from the back of the grid to the very front by the end of 2024, rarely making a misstep. While others hit the ceiling with their development earlier, or put parts on the car that didn't yield a step forward, every upgrade McLaren brought worked.
The consistent base McLaren built through last year with the MCL38 was no reason to stand still going into the new year. A number of changes prompted team principal Andrea Stella to dub the new car 'innovative' at its launch two weeks ago. That push to unlock more performance, necessary amid the close fight at the front, always came with the risk of a stumble.
That made the early feedback from Norris and teammate Oscar Piastri — that the new car felt similar to last year's in a lot of ways — encouraging for McLaren to hear. Another solid all-rounder of a car, one that could perform well in all conditions and on all kinds of tracks, would be a good start. So was Norris' lap time set towards the end of day one which Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said was 'on a different planet.'
Norris' race simulation at the end of day two really signaled McLaren's pace to the rest of the paddock, particularly in comparison to Ferrari and Mercedes. Through a 17-lap stint on the mediums, he consistently lapped in the low 1:35s range, with his fastest lap dipping into the 1:34.9s range. When Charles Leclerc started his race simulation for Ferrari on mediums about 40 minutes later, he averaged in the mid-1:35s before slipping towards the 1:36s range toward the end of the stint.
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On average, Norris was 0.25 seconds quicker per lap than Leclerc.
Norris kept finding time as the fuel burned off when he moved onto the hards, albeit running on C1s instead of the softer C2 specification for Leclerc and Kimi Antonelli. His second stint was again a couple of tenths per lap up on what Leclerc managed — 0.22s on average — before an especially rapid stint well into the 1:32s. Leclerc didn't go any quicker than a 1:33.5s lap in his final stint. More starkly, Norris and Leclerc had a 1.2-second difference in average lap time in the final stint.
One rival team member, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect relationships, described the final effort from Norris as 'mighty' and expressed hope it wasn't a true reflection of where things stand going into the new season. As always, the typical caveats of testing, like not knowing the engine mode, apply.
There were other flashes from McLaren that we didn't see from other teams. At the end of day two, Norris twice put together a quick first and second sector, only to back off and not complete the lap, instead diving into the pits. The same thing happened on Friday toward the end of the morning session, his final outing in the car before Melbourne.
Piastri was quite coy about McLaren's start to testing in the final news conference of the test week on Friday, describing testing as being 'a bit up and down' ahead of his final run in the afternoon session. Testing is never entirely smooth. Wednesday's power outage and some rain on Thursday morning had disrupted running, while teams will always make mistakes with their setup in testing as they find the limits of their new cars. But the quiet confidence emanating from McLaren throughout the winter has carried through this week in a way unfelt from many of its rivals. The vibes are positive.
Rewind 12 months, and it was Red Bull who left testing with a clear edge over its rivals, which then translated into a dominant start to the year in Bahrain. This time, it's unclear where that team stands at the front of the pack, only that this test did not go entirely to plan.
Neither Verstappen nor new teammate Liam Lawson completed a full race simulation, making it difficult to draw comparisons with their data. Speaking on Thursday, Verstappen sounded tentatively pleased with the progress made to undo many of the issues that made last year's car so troublesome for him through the second half of the season. He wanted to reserve judgment until after his full day behind the wheel on Friday, yet he did not get as much running as anticipated. Verstappen only managed 81 laps all day (fewer than Piastri, Yuki Tsunoda and Esteban Ocon managed in half a day), and did not manage more than 10 consecutive timed laps.
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Pierre Wache, Red Bull's technical director, admitted it was 'not as smooth a test as we expected,' and that the car 'did not respond how we wanted at times' amid its setup experiments, pointing to its issues going beyond the relative lack of mileage.
Much of the preseason spotlight has shone on Lewis Hamilton following his move to Ferrari, and whether it might give him the chance to fight for the eighth world championship he so craves. Hamilton's enthusiasm and energy about life at Ferrari so far has been infectious and continued throughout the week. While he admits the team still had work to do, Hamilton said he felt the most positive about a new car in years, a telling sign of just how difficult the final seasons were at Mercedes.
Hamilton wasn't able to complete a race simulation on Friday evening after the team spotted an 'anomaly on the telemetry' and decided to stop as a precaution. This means his first race-length run in the new Ferrari won't come until his debut in Australia. Until then, there are elements to refine. The handling of the SF-25 still requires some work, a view shared by Leclerc, and it didn't quite look as stable as the McLaren or as quick during the race simulation.
Leclerc's pace was more in line with that of Antonelli in the Mercedes, who embarked on a race simulation around a similar time of day, and spent much of the final stint around three seconds back from the Ferrari on-track. Leclerc lapped around two-tenths up on average on the mediums, but Antonelli was just 0.03s off through the first hard stint, and in fact one-tenth of a second per lap quicker on the second hard stint.
The most encouraging fact for Mercedes is there is no sign of the early concern that arose at testing in each of the past three years. Hamilton and George Russell both knew very early in previous testing weeks how troublesome the car would be. Now? There's far more confidence, and the car looks far more predictable while watching trackside compared to previous years.
The race simulation numbers point to Mercedes being in contention with Ferrari, something it failed to be through a lot of last year, when it instead enjoyed huge peaks and troughs in performance with the W15. Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes' trackside engineering director, said the early signs were the team had 'made good steps' to remedy the weaknesses of last year, but warned it was 'far too early to make an accurate prediction of the competitive order.'
As early as it may be, that won't stop the teams from poring through all the data from Bahrain in the coming week before starting the long journey to Australia. So fine are the margins that the group of Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari is hard to properly gauge. What is clearer out of testing is the step ahead by McLaren, making it the favorite going to Australia.
Its underdog status is firmly a thing of the past. The challenge now for McLaren is making good on its encouraging start in winter testing and making it count when the lights go out in Melbourne.
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