Why 'Formula Farce' won't last long

Formula 1 had been bracing itself for a character-building start to testing at Jerez in Spain, but few had expected the kind of day we were eventually treated to.

The talk over the winter months had been of a reliability bloodbath in Spain; of frequent red flags and blown engines.

One senior technical figure even jokingly suggested pre-Christmas that there should be a sweepstake for the number of cars that actually managed to complete an installation lap on day one.

In the end, the doommongers weren't too far wide of the mark in their predictions.

While the absence from track action of Marussia, Lotus and McLaren meant only eight teams got an installation lap under their belts, Red Bull and Caterham barely managed to do that.

The tally of 93 laps completed by the F1 field was in stark contrast to the 657 completed by the field on day one of 2013 pre-season testing.

World champion Sebastian Vettel eventually made it out of the garage © XPB

It wasn't exactly the stuff that showcases F1 as the epitome of technical brilliance.

But while F1's stuttering start at Jerez may point towards a beginning to the new F1 turbo era that could border on the farcical, the reality is slightly different.

Scrape below the headlines of title-winning teams like McLaren and Red Bull struggling so much on day one, and you come to realise that the issues we saw are not of cars about lasting the distance.

Instead, they're simply the result of the challenge in getting these new power units and cars integrated in time; the biggest hurdle is getting them up and running in the first place.

Take Red Bull. It had already been delayed in its 2014 preparations by its push to nail the world title last year - and it was an interesting revelation from team boss Christian Horner on Tuesday that his team had only began its crash testing 10 days ago.

So it was little wonder that a mistake made in the final assembly of the car at the track on Monday night - believed to be a suspension component fitted incorrectly - conspired to put it out of action for much of the first day. That had nothing to do with new V6 turbos or ERS.

Red Bull tech chief Adrian Newey, a man who has seen it all during his years in F1, said he was not surprised that many teams had a delayed start to running.

Newey and Horner wait to see their new creation at speed © LAT

"They're very complicated cars," he said. "When you first see complicated road cars, hybrid road cars or aircraft in public, they've had a huge amount of running and a huge amount of private testing.

"In F1 we don't have that luxury. We have to come out straight away to try to get these very complicated systems to work in the public arena. It was always likely this was going to be the case in the first few days of testing."

The complexity of these 2014 cars cannot be underestimated, and that's perhaps why the situation on Tuesday was so extreme.

Any new piece of technology always takes time to be understood, evaluated and exploited, and F1 teams are having to do this with all-new technology in a very compressed timeframe.

Rather than being able to ignore the groundwork and simply go out and see how quickly the car goes, the reality is a slow and laborious process of understanding exactly what's going on underneath the carbonfibre bodywork.

After all, Boeing don't hand out their 747s to airlines without an instruction manual and just a message to pilots to just get out there and fly it...

The Toro Rosso got going before big brother Red Bull's new car © LAT

Renault head of track operations Remi Taffin said day one had perhaps appeared worse than it was, simply because F1's manufacturers needed to be cautious and take things one step at a time.

"I think progress will for sure be slow," he said. "We have to discover the new cars and the new power unit.

"We are more on the cautious side so far, where every single lap we are doing, we're trying to inspect everything and look at any glitches or anything like that.

"But it takes time. It's fair to say that it's not totally new to us, but it's completely different to last year's V8 and we are still learning. If you mix a learning phase and new toys it takes time."

But despite the difficult start, Taffin says talk is already of teams getting up to 200-300km by days two or three.

It was a view shared by Toro Rosso's Franz Tost, who laughed off talk that the experience of day one suggests that F1 could be heading for a comedy start to the season.

"I'm convinced that tomorrow or the day after tomorrow most of the problems will be solved, if it's software problems," he said. "If it was hardware problems that's another story, but so far I've not recognised any major hardware problems at Toro Rosso.

It wasn't all reliability work - Ferrari had time to get the flow-vis paint out © XPB

"I don't expect a farce at the first race in Melbourne. I expect that at Jerez, already on Thursday or Friday, we will be in a position to sit here and hear the fantastic music from the cars passing us. And it's the first test in January.

"There's a lot of time before Melbourne and I'm convinced the engineers from the different manufacturers will solve all these items."

Newey, the benchmark in terms of car designers because of his phenomenal success rate, was equally sanguine about the situation. Yes, things are going to be difficult, but F1's brilliant engineering will help see it through.

Perhaps what day one at Jerez proved beyond all doubt is that we're going to have to wait a very long time to get a competitive picture of the teams.

Long-run analysis is pointless; teams and drivers won't be pushing things to the max for a while. And reliability - albeit not as extreme as it is now - is going to be a factor as we go on.

Newey for one reckons that F1 is heading into a campaign of uncertainties, with the formbook rewritten.

"I can't see that there are any favourites," he said. "I think it's so new and so open that it's an 'all-bets-are-off' situation. It's very difficult to forecast who is going to be where."

No one could argue with that after Jerez day one. That's not a farce, it's F1 at its best.