F1 pre-season testing is a time of optimism and renewed hope for many, but the time-sheets don't always tell the full story.
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Pre-season testing in Formula 1 is an exciting time of the year for both fans and people involved in the sport. After all, F1 pre-season testing offers the chance of a fresh start, and new hope for the season.
Of course, in many cases the hope soon becomes dread of a long slog of a season ahead. But in many cases – especially teams at the front of the grid – they can sometimes go in the opposite direction.
They can take steps to hide just how fast their cars really are, a phenomenon referred to as “sandbagging”. It’s usually done so as not to reveal all their cards prior to the season-opener.
Also read: Ferrari F1 team seek to ‘optimise’ F1-75 before Bahrain pre-season testing
As F1 gears up for the second round of pre-season testing at Bahrain, we look at five notable instances when teams took it upon themselves to hide how fast their cars really were.
The Mercedes F1 team have been the most dominant side in the sport since 2014’s turbo-hybrid era got underway. Still, that hasn’t stopped the team from keeping a few secrets hidden during pre-season testing. And never was this more evident than in 2018.
The Ferrari’s of Kimi Raikkonen and Sebastian Vettel were topping the sheets, with Vettel in particular a second faster than everyone else. But Mercedes were clearly holding back, as the car which raced more than matched up to the Scuderia.
Granted, 2018 was decided partially by Vettel’s individual mistakes too – but Mercedes were at their dominant best in a car that kept getting quicker as the season went on. Little surprise that they took both championships come the end of the season.
As the old saying goes – the more things change, the more they stay the same. Mercedes had done a good job of hiding their true potential in 2018, but it can be argued that 2019 was an even better con job by the Brackley-based outfit.
Again it was Ferrari who dominated pre-season that year, with Mercedes staring at a half-second pace deficit at times. Lewis Hamilton admitted afterwards that the team had quite the mountain to climb. But come the first race weekend at Melbourne, it was Hamilton who took pole – and Valtteri Bottas who took the win.
Mercedes went on to win 15 races that year, claiming the constructor’s title with Hamilton winning a sixth world championship. The proverbial mountain – if it ever even existed – had been well and truly climbed.
The story of Brawn GP is a well-known one at this point. Emerging from the Ashes of the Honda F1 team in 2009, the Ross Brawn-owned team were, in many ways, lucky to even be on the grid. But despite that, the team knew how good their car really was. And they did their best to hide it before the season.
Indeed, they ran a heavier car during pre-season at Barcelona – and still managed to top the time sheets, sometimes by over a second! The car best understood the ‘double diffuser’ trick and this led to rivals becoming suspicious.
And yes, they weren’t fastest in the final run of pre-season – that honour went to Kazuki Nakajima of Williams. Interestingly, Nakajima didn’t score a point all season and was dropped by the team come the end of the year. As for Brawn? They only won the world and constructor’s championship.
It is worth remembering that before 2021, Red Bull had also won four straight driver’s and team titles from 2009-13. It is also worth noting that, in none of those years, were they the fastest team in pre-season testing!
For this example we will look at 2013, the last of that four-year run. The quickest team in testing was Mercedes, although this wasn’t a false dawn; the team were consistent podium finishers and even won races that year. But it was Ferrari who came closest to matching them during pre-season.
Yet Red Bull found their form quickly in the season, with Sebastian Vettel going on an incredible nine-race win streak. The tweaks and developments made undoubtedly helped, but Red Bull were always up and about the top during races anyway – showing they successfully pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes.
To say that 2012 was a mad year for Formula 1 would be an understatement. The first seven races of the year saw seven different winners, and the title fight went down the wire as a result. Yet if you were to look only at the test times, you wouldn’t be able to guess who were the teams that competed for the title.
That’s because it was Lotus and Kimi Raikkonen who were fastest throughout testing. Raikkonen even ended the four-day tests atop the timesheet; eventual title winners Red Bull were nowhere near the pace at that point.
Yet Lotus did not win a race until the season-ending Abu Dhabi GP. Part of it was down to the drivers – Raikkonen needed time after a few years out of the sport, and Romain Grosjean made headlines more for his spectacular crashes than anything else. But it was also down to Red Bull – again – hiding their true pace.
