F1 2016: The great, the good, the average

As Formula 1 nears the end of pre-season testing, so more teams are finally starting to explore the potential of their new cars.

Development parts are bolted on, set-ups are refined, tyres are thrown at the cars for long and short runs. With only two weeks to go until everyone turns wheels for free practice in Melbourne, there is not much time to waste.

I spent the day watching all the cars closely from trackside, as well as trawling the paddock to find out what's going behind the scenes.

To me a clear competitive order is already taking shape, which can be divided into four distinct groups.

THE GREAT

Mercedes is the class of the field again. It just does everything, like it has done the past two years. It stops well, it accelerates well, it's got good traction, and good braking stability.

The high-speed change of direction is probably its biggest strength. When you watch at Turns 1, 2 and 3, the front of the Mercedes goes where the drivers want and the rear really keeps up with it. It's in that medium-to-high-speed change of direction that it is really impressive to watch.

And the car's obviously bulletproof. Mercedes will have probably done a season's worth of kilometres come the end of testing. At the end of the first test the team had done 11 race distances. It's terrifying!

This probably tells you it has got something in hand. Although Rosberg did a 1m23.0s on a soft tyre run earlier this week, you could argue Mercedes hasn't shown its full hand in terms of qualifying engine modes, which it usually keeps in reserve.

Ferrari is next best, clearly. And that's a clear second place over the likes of Williams and Red Bull. The car is a definite step forward from last year. I remember this time last year watching at the same corners and the front end wasn't as responsive in the entry and the change of direction phase as it seems to be this year.

It's impressive the progress Ferrari has made on that. Despite all the updates Ferrari made on last year's car, that inherent characteristic never went away. This year it is starting at a better level.

Ferrari might not be at Mercedes' level, but has looked well sorted for the majority of testing © XPB

There are lots of rumours you read on the internet about the new Ferrari engine being unreliable, but Ferrari did 150 laps on Wednesday, 136 on Thursday, and it has completed a race simulation. Maybe Ferrari doesn't have Mercedes' levels of reliability, but a lot has changed on the car and I don't think the issues Ferrari has had are a concern.

Pace-wise, if you try to break it down you'd say both Kimi Raikkonen and Nico Rosberg did a 1m23.0s lap on soft tyres, but Rosberg did it on day one of this test, Raikkonen did it on day three, so the track could be a little bit better for Kimi.

We also don't know where they were on engine modes, so for that we can only look historically and the Mercedes has been able to take a bigger jump forward in that regard.

All things considered, you'd probably say Ferrari is on average two or three tenths behind Mercedes. At some tracks they'll be an equal and others Ferrari probably half a second away.

THE GOOD

The next bunch is really hard to read. I watched Felipe Massa a lot in the Williams when he was pounding around on the mediums and the car doesn't look as good as the Toro Rosso, the Force India, or the Red Bull.

But when he puts the soft on and goes for lap both he and Valtteri Bottas seem to be able to turn a fast time, so does that mean they are running heavier fuel on the mediums and masking performance, or are they not able to get the tyres to work?

The car does seem tricky to drive on the longer runs. Massa struggled to hit the same lines lap after lap in the way some other people do, he struggled to stop the car particularly at Turns 1, 4 and 5 on the medium runs.

In the slow and medium-speed stuff, such as Turn 5, even on the softs the front just doesn't turn in to the apex as well as the Toro Rosso, for example.

Williams ended last year as third best, but not as convincingly as it was in 2014, so it has got to work really hard and be a bit sharper with strategy to get everything correct and make sure it is ahead of the others, because I don't think the new car gives it the advantage it used to have.

The Red Bull and Toro Rosso are quite close. The Red Bull chassis does everything the drivers want, like a Merc without a Merc engine!

I've spoken to people in a couple of teams who reckon the Red Bull is definitely running more rake this year and it's noticeable in Turn 3, where the car is under a lot of aero load. When they accelerate through fifth, sixth, seventh gear, the front is buried in the ground, sparks are coming off the front skidplate, but you can actually see daylight under the rear floor.

You don't see that with any other car. It's very unusual and interesting that Red Bull needs to set the car up that way to get the floor to work.

Toro Rosso appears to have produced arguably its most competitive package to date © LAT

The Toro Rosso looks really impressive on track. The high-speed balance and change of direction doesn't look as good as the Red Bull, and certainly not as good as the Ferrari or Mercedes, but it's pretty good.

In the low speed it looks really good. At Turn 5 and Turn 1, and even the final sector, the nose really went in, and Max Verstappen was able to get good drive off the corner. It was pretty impressive to watch.

If you took last year's car and bolted a Ferrari engine into it, it would offer a decent chunk of laptime. Toro Rosso is firmly in the hunt to be third, fourth, fifth or sixth best.

Force India is also in there. The headline times have been really impressive. The long runs are harder to judge. Speaking to people from other teams who've looked at GPS data and analysed the runs a bit more, they think Force India is a little further behind than the ultimate laptimes suggest.

The headline times suggest it should be firmly third best, but the reality is it's probably in that fight, along with three other teams.

The front of the car looks stiffer than most others out there, and on the entry to Turn 5 the inside front wheel lifts off the ground more than others. It also has a bit more understeer built into it, but perhaps that's a trick to manage the rear tyres.

Perhaps Force India has realised going down this path has helped score some big results in the past, when rear tyre degradation is critical, so it has just carried on down that path.

THE AVERAGE

Renault is probably next, just because Haas is not yet up to speed operationally and I expect it will have the usual first-year niggling issues.

Sauber, Haas and McLaren are all together in that bunch.

McLaren's reliability is better, but it's quite clear that drivability and outright power is still a problem.

Someone at Ferrari told me how much work has gone into improving drivability and how critical it is to performance with these power units. Ferrari made a massive step from 2014-15, another reasonable step from '15 to '16, but when you watch the McLaren out on track it just doesn't look like it has good drivability.

Mid-corner to exit, on throttle, the car looks very unpredictable and difficult to drive. The engineers are obviously trying things, because Fernando Alonso went from having a snappy rear end in the morning to quite a bit of understeer between runs.

McLaren looks like a team that knows its engine is not as competitive as it would like and therefore a lot of energy and brainpower is being spent on how to cover those deficiencies.

I think the problems are a consequence of that. The chassis set-up doesn't look great and the car doesn't look easy to drive - similar to the Renault.

Last year the McLaren chassis looked balanced and the drivers could hustle it for a laptime, but they don't look comfortable in this one.

McLaren has found some reliability, but still has plenty of work to do © XPB

Even if Honda found 70bhp it's still behind the game, but there's a lot of other stuff going on around it and McLaren doesn't look like it has optimised the chassis in the way it did at the end of last year.

If Haas can get operationally sorted it can be in that group. If not it will be at the bottom end of that bunch.

I didn't get to see much of the car on track, because Romain Grosjean went off too many times! But on paper the Haas car should be quite good. The team has a lot of support from Ferrari, and there are a lot of very clever people at Dallara. These are two very good organisations to have in your corner.

Haas has the potential to be at the head of this group of four - if it can keep up in the development race and get the reliability and operational issues sorted. Maybe not seventh best in the championship, because it will lose ground early on, but to be the seventh best team in the second half of the season.

The Sauber looks like a safe evolution of last year's car. It's a small step, not to the degree of the others. McLaren will be ahead of Sauber if the MP4-31's set-up issues get sorted.

The Renault looks quite edgy and tricky to drive. Jolyon Palmer was struggling to hit the same lines lap after lap, particularly through Turns 1, 2 and 3. Renault is lacking downforce and hasn't made a big step forward from where Lotus was over the winter.

Renault has got to invest so much this year, in infrastructure and R&D, if it wants to be a factory team in the way Mercedes and Ferrari are. Renault wants to compete for the championship in five years' time, and it looks like it will actually take that long.

But the ingredients are there. Bob Bell, Fred Vasseur and Chris Dyer are all key cogs in the wheel. Vasseur is a very clever guy and runs a really good race team. He knows how to do it, but he needs time and money.

If Renault can finish this year sixth or seventh, that will represent a good holding pattern. Then it needs to edge forward one position at a time until it gets there.

THE BASIC

The Manor is on its own in this group. The team has clearly made a step forward, because Pascal Wehrlein managed a 1m24.9s on Thursday, which is only 2.2s off the quickest time we've seen all week. That's a massive leap from where it was before.

The problem for Manor is that Haas has arrived and is going to be immediately one group ahead of it.

The car looks much more basic than the others. It's a team that hasn't got the finances or the infrastructure, with only three months of refurbishment under its belt.

The powertrain has closed the gap for Manor; it's just a question of how much it can develop through the season.