10 things we learned from the first F1 test

The first test ahead of the 2017 Formula 1 season was always going to produce as many questions as answers. With a new generation of car being ushered in and the likes of Renault and Honda overhauling their engine designs to try and catch Mercedes, the pre-season has not been short of talking points.

Halfway through testing and we've had the first few indicators of what we can expect from the coming campaign, be they from trackside observations or paddock chatter.

The 10 teams will be spending another four days at Barcelona next week, so there is plenty of scope for things to change before the season-opening Australian Grand Prix takes place on March 26.

Still, Autosport's trackside team has been able to draw several early conclusions from the opening test.

MERCEDES IS NOT PERFECT
Edd Straw (@EddStrawF1)

Valtteri Bottas set the fastest time of the test and the Mercedes looked good on track much of the time, although there were occasions when both the Finn and Lewis Hamilton were struggling a little to get the car into the corners.

Given there have been some clarifications to the suspension regulations, it's not unreasonable to ask if there are some re-adjustments that need to be made to get the car to handle as well as it has done in previous years.

The Mercedes also ran very reliably out of the box, but it was not without problems. On the last day Bottas logged only 68 laps, while an electrical issue was blamed for preventing Hamilton running in the morning - and then the team ended the day early for precautionary reasons after finding something worrying in the data.

Does any of that mean Mercedes is in trouble? Not a chance. The car is good and it will be right up there in 2017. But given the way the test started, with Mercedes racking up the laps and setting a good pace, there were fears that this might be the last three years all over again.

Even so, it appears that Mercedes still has some work to do.

FERRARI REALLY DOES LOOK GOOD
Gary Anderson (@Autosport)

Ferrari has been known to run a bit light in pre-season testing in recent times, but the car genuinely looked good. I was also impressed by the professionalism of Ferrari's approach, since in the past the team would just throw tyres at the car to put in a lap time - here it stuck by its guns and focused on optimising the package.

It's one thing for the lap times to be good, and Sebastian Vettel's fastest time was just 0.247 seconds slower than Bottas's pace using soft rubber rather than the quicker ultra-softs Bottas used. But watching from trackside tells you a lot about the car.

The Ferrari simply looked like the best car out there. Mario Andretti used to say that the ground-effect Lotus 79 he won the 1978 world championship in was painted to the road, and that's exactly what the Ferrari looked like.

From my viewpoint at Turn 2, I could see the drivers get the power on cleanly at the exit, then tuck the nose in for the fast Turn 3 right-hander effortlessly. Once there, they could get on the power and hold the right line through the corner.

It just looks like it's a very good car. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a Mercedes beater, but it's looking very promising.

Given that Ferrari was all over the place last year, technically and operationally, I was not expecting to see the car looking this strong.

HONDA IS IN SERIOUS TROUBLE
Ben Anderson (@BenAndersonAuto)

After the well-documented struggles of the past two years, this is meant to be the season Honda starts delivering the sort of performance that can thrust McLaren back into the fight with Formula 1's big dogs.

Honda has made big promises, and big changes - supposedly following a combustion engine layout pioneered by Mercedes, and working on the pre-chamber ignition, lean-combustion technology it was sorely lacking last season.

The Japanese manufacturer reckoned it can match the power levels achieved by Mercedes at the end of 2016.

The early signs from testing suggest it isn't on target. What's more, new reliability problems are creeping in as well.

Two days of running were lost to power unit failures, one of which has been traced to a faulty Honda oil tank design, the other of which caused a significant problem inside one of the new internal combustion engine's six cylinders.

The disappointing pattern of the past 24 months looks to be continuing - Honda under pressure to deliver significant improvements, but engineering in new problems that it will have to waste time fixing while its rivals progress.

Yes, Honda has started late under these complex F1 engine regulations, and it has endured the disadvantage of having to rebuild its racing infrastructure from scratch, but it really should be making constant progress by now.

Honda needed a strong start this week, yet already it looks to be struggling.

That is really bad news for McLaren-Honda's hopes of returning to proper competitiveness in 2017.

BUT McLAREN ISN'T PERFECT EITHER
Ben Anderson

McLaren has made a big point of shouting about how much better it has become at producing decent chassis in recent times, and how it has cast the dark days of 2013 firmly aside.

The last two McLaren chassis have been difficult to judge, thanks principally to the lack of performance produced by the Honda engine. Sometimes McLaren has looked strong, and overachieved against teams with significantly more power; and at other times its cars have looked inconsistent and difficult to drive.

Stoffel Vandoorne admitted Honda's engine problems meant McLaren couldn't complete a proper run over the first two days of this test, but when the car ran reliably enough for Fernando Alonso to do some decent running on Wednesday, the car did not look good on track.

Alonso was struggling for grip and unable to commit to the corners with any confidence. That may come with more track time and set-up work - McLaren is in effect two days behind its major rivals after all - but the contrast with the immediate poise shown by Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull was stark.

McLaren is stuck in a vicious cycle - battling to overcome the deficiencies of a weak engine that reduces its ability to unlock aerodynamic performance from the chassis. All the while serious questions remain concerning the engine, so McLaren cannot be sure whether its car is any good or not.

Regardless, Alonso must be fearing yet another season wasting his extraordinary driving talents in uncompetitive machinery. It's still early days of course, but McLaren has a great deal of work to do to refine the MCL32 into a competitive proposition.

WET-WEATHER TESTING IS A FARCE
Glenn Freeman (@glenn_autosport)

Attempts to turn Thursday's running into a wet-tyre test for Pirelli didn't work. The track was artificially soaked overnight and again in the morning just before the pits opened, but very few teams ventured out to do serious running in those conditions.

Pirelli had issued a set of guidelines it wanted the teams to "consider" including in their plans while the track was wet, ranging from assessing aquaplaning, degradation over a long run, and crossover points between wet, intermediate and slick tyres.

But with only a handful of teams bothering in the morning, the decision was taken to soak the track again at lunchtime, and this proved even more pointless.

With the sun beating down, those that had completed some running in the morning seemed unwilling to do it again. Both times, the track became significantly busier when it was ready for slicks.

Pirelli can't win here. The teams have repeatedly complained about the wet tyres, leading to the addition of wet running at this test, but then they didn't seem interested in taking part.

The switch to wider tyres has made the Italian company's job even more difficult, and it's resulted in the intermediate - with which the drivers were largely happy last year - needing revisions.

As for testing any subsequent changes, Formula 1 needs to come up with something better than what it tried at Barcelona this week.

THERE IS MORE TO COME FROM THE NEW CARS
Edd Straw

Bottas's fastest time of 1m19.705s was 3.060s faster than the best in pre-season testing at this track last year and 2.295s faster than Lewis Hamilton's pole position time for last year's Spanish Grand Prix.

It's still 1.361s slower than the fastest recorded lap time on this configuration of the Barcelona circuit, which was changed for the 2007 race - a 1m18.339. That was set by Felipe Massa in April 2008 using experimental Bridgestone slicks during the final year of grooved tyres.

These cars can surely get into the high 1m18s, and some suggested that the pole position time could even be lower than that. Much will depend on the pace of development between now and May's Spanish GP.

The gain is in braking distances and corner speed, as Haas driver Romain Grosjean explains.

"When you have done 500 laps here with the previous generation of car you come here, brake at the same point and realise it's 20 metres too early," says Grosjean. "It takes time to get used to it but it's cool to drive.

"Whenever we are on very light fuel it's going to be a bit of a priere de courage [prayer of courage] to go into some high-speed corners."

Inevitably, more downforce means more drag, and the top speed seen on the main straight in this test, 206.5mph set by Antonio Giovinazzi on Thursday, was 8mph slower than the best set in qualifying for last year's race.

DRIVERS ARE WORKING HARDER, AND LIKE IT
Glenn Freeman

When people ran out of things to talk about over the winter, driver training was a topic that often came up. Everyone on the grid admitted to upping their regime ahead of driving these more physically demanding cars.

Talk of drivers being "destroyed" after testing was a bit over-the-top - nobody had to be carried from his car or garage at the end of a day's running - but most drivers were feeling the effects of driving the car more than they have in recent years.

Nico Rosberg's suggestion that drivers could lose races because of being pushed beyond their physical limits caught the eye, and Hamilton talked of having "bruises and bumps where I've not had them before". But on the whole the drivers were relishing the additional physical challenge of the 2017 cars - because it relates directly to the fact they are going faster.

"They are a bit tougher but it's fun," said Ricciardo, who was one of several drivers to highlight the differences felt in the high-speed Turns 3 and 9, while Vettel believes drivers will adapt to the increased demands.

"You feel it obviously, but it's back to how it was a few years ago when the cars were significantly faster," said the Ferrari driver. "It's more enjoyable when it's faster in the corners - like we had in 2010, and I'm holding up."

STROLL HAS HAD A BAPTISM OF FIRE
Glenn Freeman

If Lance Stroll goes on to have a great Formula 1 career, this week will be looked back on as the time he was a fearless rookie pushing to explore the limits from day one, rather than the week he earned Pastor Maldonado-like infamy for being too far over the edge.

Stroll twice put the Williams FW40 in the gravel this week, the first time with a high-speed spin at Turn 9 that damaged the team's only front wing and stopped his running for the day after just 12 laps. He then only avoided bringing out a red flag the following day because he went off as the chequered flag came out.

It was his third incident that hit the hardest - literally - as he crashed exiting Turn 5 and put the Williams in the wall, forcing the team to skip the final day of the test.

Support came not only from his team but also Lewis Hamilton, who believes this year's new breed of F1 car has made the task for rookies so much tougher. But it appears that it's the new, bigger, better tyres that are proving the most challenging, and that's a Williams problem, not just Stroll's.

Felipe Massa has also been uncomfortable with the way the tyres can break away, according to the team, so Williams is looking to fix that problem rather than assuming its new kid on the block isn't up to it.

RULES CONTROVERSIES HAVE RETURNED
Jonathan Noble (@NobleF1)

Formula 1's new cars were always going to open up the possibility of a rules controversy, but it is previously-used technology that remains the big talking point right now.

Discussions about trick suspension systems have been bubbling away all winter, but matters reached a head on the eve of the Barcelona test when the FIA laid down its definitive ruling on what is and is not allowed.

The key question then became what impact it will have on the two teams in the spotlight, Mercedes and Red Bull.

The governing body has begun a process of inspecting all the suspension systems of the current cars, and the onus is on the teams to prove that their concepts comply with the regulations. It is understood that one team has already been advised to make some adjustments to what it was planning to use.

The FIA hopes that by the end of pre-season testing, all the teams will have been looked at - and then it will be up to the individual competitors to decide what they want to run in Australia, amid the potential risk of a protest if they choose to go against advice.

But suspension was not the only technical talking point in testing. Red Bull had sought clarification about manufacturers illegally using oil as fuel - amid suspicions that Mercedes could have been getting a power advantage this way. The FIA confirmed that such an action would be against the rules.

Plus Renault will have to make revisions to its rear wing after its idea to attach the pillar support to the DRS activation pod, rather than through the main plane, was ruled as not in compliance with the rules.

AERO INNOVATION MAY NOT BE A GOOD THING
Gary Anderson

The idea this year was to open up the rules to make the cars faster, and that has certainly had the desired effect. That also means we've seen some new aero details turn up.

The return of the shark fin is a step backwards. They were banned because they looked stupid, so it's even more stupid to bring them back once you've got rid of them by not bothering to write the rules properly.

Some cars, such as the Mercedes, the Haas, the Williams and the Ferrari, also tried out T-wings that were mounted directly on to the shark fin. The point of the shark fin is to improve the stability of the airflow, and the T-wing to manage the airflow going to the rear wing so that works better, but at times on track both parts were vibrating far too much to be doing that consistently.

But we've seen some nice work in areas such as the turning vanes and the sidepods, particularly on the Ferrari. Mercedes has been aggressive with its bigger diffuser, so we are seeing the big teams pushing things, and Red Bull has turned up with its nose duct.

There's going to be plenty to come in the next few months. Hopefully that includes the shark fins going out of fashion or being banned.