Max Verstappen ‘looking like the 2x world champion he is’ in Day 1 of Bahrain testing | F1 on ESPN

It probably won't surprise you to hear that Max Verstappen was the fastest driver on the first day of pre-season testing ahead of the new Formula One season and he was looking pretty good, very much like the two-time world champion he is. Of course, testing, you can't tell a huge amount from the first day, you can't really tell a huge amount after all three days. We had to take everything with a pinch of salt, but the fact that the Rebel was up there, no real surprise. They're the world champions, they had such a sorted package last year and it's very clear from the car which we really saw for the first time today but they just evolved it slightly, they built on the good bits that they had and they've taken it a step forward and Max seemed very happy at the end of the day. Really, that's the kind of thing that we're dealing with at this stage of testing, his body language, messages coming from the team, of course, whether the teams were unreliably, pretty much all ten teams did, they all got a lot of laps on the board which is good considering they're only three days of testing. In second place was the Aston Martin and Fernando Alonso. Again, underlining that maybe these times aren't necessarily what we expect to see when we get to the first race, he was only two hundredths of a second off Max Verstappen.

Now, if that's the case, in Bahrain and qualifying, that would be a huge achievement for Aston Martin, but I don't realistically think it will be. But still, it was a solid start for them and Fernando always likes to make a statement. I think putting on the second fastest time, albeit in much more favorable track conditions towards the end of the day compared to when Verstappen set his time, is still just a little confidence boost for that team who were clearly aiming quite high this year. Elsewhere, for R&E third fastest, again, not a huge amount to read into it, but the car looked good, they ran reliably through the day. That's important, of course, for them one of the big things is to make sure that their engine, all the reliability issues they had on that last year, which means they had to turn down the power on the engine, a soul for this year, so fast they're good. So, those are the days, but you tend to notice the teams are struggling much more at this time in testing, rather than the teams that are near the top of the time sheets. Another team that didn't seem to have too many problems were Mercedes, and of course Mercedes did not live up to their very high expectations last year, but so far, so good this year, the bouncing which they really suffered with, certainly in testing and in the opening races, the first five or six races of last season, seems to have been cured a little bit this year, and they seem to be able to run that car in a bit of a happier place than they were before, but again, to try and read into whether Lewis Hamilton and George Russell will be in the title fight this year, way too early to tell.

Elsewhere, yeah, everyone looking pretty settled, pretty good. Really, it's about building up an understanding of the cars at this time, working through setup options, understanding when you change wing level, or when you change the ride height, what does it do with cycling through the different compounds of tyres, understanding how they work, how to treat them over a race distance. These are all the things that are going on, and we're differing fuel loads, different engine modes, it's really hard to tell who's actually quick and who's not, because that can make a big difference and completely skew the times. So, we've learned a little bit, we've kind of seen that everyone is on track, it's built the excitement certainly for the new season, but we'll have to wait for the next two days to see how things unfold.

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