Bahrain Preview: Facts & Stats

It has been 21 weeks since Fernando Alonso sealed his and Renault's championship titles - the French car-maker's first as a constructor.

After a month off, the Formula One teams were back in action in the final week of November, beginning the monotonous work of testing. The only team to skip the six-week sabbatical were Ferrari, who were in action at Vallelunga just 10 days after the 2005 season finale at Shanghai.

Last season, the Bridgestone camp - and particularly Ferrari - constantly insisted that, with only the Italian squad doing serious tyre testing, the Japanese tyre maker was lagging behind Michelin on development.

Bridgestone logged 20,000kms of testing last winter, compared to Michelin's 100,000. This year, after Toyota and Williams switched to Bridgestone, the Japanese camp has racked up nearly 70,000kms while Michelin have again accumulated over 100,000kms.

The teams as a whole have completed over 170,000kms with Honda the clear leader - accounting for 15% of the total testing mileage.

Surprisingly, Midland - supposedly the paupers of the party - have completed more testing than Red Bull-Ferrari. While that may be down to Red Bull's reliability problems (they have conducted 40 "car days" of testing compared to Midland's 35), the lap times from Jerez don't make for comfortable reading for David Coulthard and Christian Klien.

Toro Rosso, Red Bull's junior team, stopped the clock on 1:19.394 on the first day's running of their new STR01. Red Bull's RB2 hasn't yet broken the one-minute-21-seconds mark at the same circuit.

On the other hand, at Barcelona, Austrian Klien lapped three seconds quicker than Toro Rosso's RB1 - and more encouragingly, just 25 hundredths of a second behind the McLaren MP4-21's best time of the winter, set the day before.

Testing can often throw up unusual situations. On December 1st, for instance, Renault attended a test at Jerez with three drivers - all of whom ended up as third drivers for different teams.

Super Aguri's Franck Montagny, then Renault's regular test driver, was joined by Robert Kubica (now of BMW Sauber) and Giorgio Mondini (who will be seen at Midland this year), and they finished the day in that order.

Montagny may now be with the team predicted to be the tail-end Charlie, but the indications are that Super Aguri will be more competitive than most have predicted so far.

The new team's only serious running has amounted to just 109 laps, over three days at Barcelona. However, Takuma Sato's best time, 1:19.787, would have placed him ahead of Patrick Friesacher on the grid for the 2005 Spanish Grand Prix. That time was set with the aerodynamics of a 2002 Arrows A23 (which, ironically, scored points at Barcelona), and while a 2006-spec aero kit should theoretically be slower, it's an encouraging start.

Super Aguri, Midland and Toro Rosso will all make their F1 debut in the Bahrain Grand Prix. The last time three new teams appeared in the same race was in the 1991 United States GP. That day, Lamborghini, Jordan (Midland's predecessor) and Footwork all made their debut - the latter team beginning the five-year period in which they were not known as Arrows.

The shining example of how to make your F1 debut in this era is undoubtedly Red Bull Racing. Fifth and sixth was the best qualifying debut since March locked out the front row at Kyalami in 1970. Better still, 4th and 7th in the race meant they became the first team to score points with two cars, first time out, since Mercedes-Benz in 1954.

Aguri Suzuki, Zakspeed 891 Yamaha, in the 1989 Monaco GP © LAT

Toro Rosso's ambitions will necessarily be modest. One short-term goal will be to get a car home on the lead lap of a Grand Prix. Gaston Mazzacane was the last man to achieve such a feat driving a Minardi, at the 2000 German GP. Midland will probably have reliability on their side, with Tiago Monteiro completing 1,125 racing laps in 2005 - a record for one season.

Whatever Super Aguri manage, they will surely beat their founder's first full season in 1989.

Driving a Zakspeed saddled with a breathless Yamaha V8, Aguri Suzuki suffered the ignominy of being the only driver in history to fail to pre-qualify for every single race in a season. Even his respected teammate Bernd Schneider only made the cut twice. By the end of the following season, Suzuki had become the first Japanese to climb the F1 podium. The only other man to do it since is now his number one driver - Takuma Sato at the 2004 United States GP.

First 2006 car test

 1.  Toyota TF106       B   29-Nov-2005
 2.  Renault R26        M   10-Jan-2006
 3.  Red Bull RB2       M   10-Jan-2006
 4.  Ferrari 248 F1     B   16-Jan-2006
 5.  BMW Sauber F1.06   M   17-Jan-2006
 6.  Mclaren MP4/21     M   23-Jan-2006
 7.  Honda RA106        M   25-Jan-2006
 8.  Williams FW28      B   31-Jan-2006
 9.  Midland MF16       B   07-Feb-2006
10.  Toro Rosso STR01   M   09-Feb-2006
11.  Aguri A23/SA05     B   21-Feb-2006

Aguri would have yearned for the kind of preseason testing afforded to Toyota. Having exclusively tested the TF106 since November 29th, they had a three-month head start on the F1 rookies.

Ralf Schumacher will need a better start to the year than he had in 2005, when he trailed Trulli through every lap of the first four races. It was consistency that made Ralf's season - only Alonso bettered his 14 points-scoring finishes - and so he pipped Trulli in the championship at the final race.

While Michael Schumacher holds the all-time record for wins and for second-place finishes, Ralf has a golden opportunity to eclipse the record for most career fifth-place finishes, which he currently shares with the late Elio de Angelis, on 17.

It's not the first time these two drivers have encountered each other in the record books. De Angelis was F1's youngest-ever podium visitor when he was second at Interlagos in 1980, aged 21 years and 307 days. That record lasted until Ralf beat it by 19 days at the 1997 Argentinean GP.

Of course, this was the era before Alonso owned every record that begins with "Youngest Man Who....". In fact, if Alonso retains his crown this year, he will also be the second-youngest champion ever, which truly puts his youth into perspective.

Nico Rosberg has a reasonable chance of beating some of Alonso's records this season, however. Taking a pole or a win, leading a race, finishing on the podium, or setting a fastest lap - these are all record-setting possibilities for the reigning GP2 champion, who is now a year younger than Alonso was when he set these records in 2003.

Olivier Panis (Ligier JS43 Mugen-Honda) wins the 1996 Monaco GP © LAT

At the other end of the scale, Michael Schumacher is extending existing records every time he ventures onto the circuit. One obscure stat in particular illustrates the German's longevity at the top level: a win this year would make him the only driver in history to take race victories 14 years apart.

Given his grim 2005 campaign, it was a shock to many that in the eight-race period between Monaco and Hungary, nobody outscored Schumacher. The wheels came off the wagon slightly at the end of the year, and he is riding a six-race streak without a podium - the longest since the first six races of his F1 career.

Meanwhile, we have two returning marques, Honda and BMW. Honda last took the chequered flag as a constructor at Monza in 1967, and their next win would shatter the record of gap between victories for a constructor.

Renault went 20 years between Alain Prost's win at the Osterreichring in 1983 and Alonso's at Hungary in 2003, but it is a slightly false record, since Renault withdrew after 1985 and spent 16 years away. Likewise with Honda, who - having pulled out at the end of 1968 - have only really gone one season without a victory.

Ligier went 15 consecutive years between wins, as after Jacques Laffite's triumph at Montreal in 1981, they had to wait until the 1996 Monaco Grand Prix, when Olivier Panis drove the race of his life to win from 14th on the grid, in a race that set the record for fewest finishers (only three cars actually saw the flag).

BMW's return is rather less straightforward. Since they have named themselves BMW-Sauber, it is highly likely that most will continue to count their stats toward Sauber, as happened after Louis Stanley bought BRM in 1974, the team becoming Stanley-BRM. If, as most expect, they become simply "BMW" in the future, they would own the record for longest time between GP starts.

BMW-Sauber in pre-season testing © Reuters

BMW competed in the 1952 and 1953 German Grands Prix, at a time when the World Championship was held under F2 regulations. They also attempted to qualify for the 1969 German GP, again with an F2 car, but withdrew after the death of their driver Gerhard Mitter in practice.

Mitter was one of fourteen drivers to lose his life in the first 200 races in the F1 World Championship history. By stark contrast, this weekend's race in Bahrain will mark 200 races since the last F1 fatality.

We are, statistically, in the safest era in the sport's history: 186 events separated Ricardo Paletti's accident at Montreal in 1982, and Roland Ratzenberger's in qualifying at Imola in 1994. Two hundred races on, let's hope it stays that way.