If Catalunya is showing the shape of the season to come, it’s thrillingly close

Throughout most of the Circuit de Catalunya’s three decades of gracing the Formula 1 calendar, the track has had a reputation for being the best indicator for relative car performance of any in the championship.

A track that more experienced drivers know better than any other, the Barcelona circuit used to see cars run thousands of laps annually around the 4.6km course in pre- and in-season testing prior to the Spanish Grand Prix.

With its generous main straight, several sustained mid-speed corners, a fiddly low-speed section or two and a pair of high speed sweepers to end the lap, Catalunya was believed to be the best ‘all-round’ circuit to test any F1 car’s fundamental performance. And when it came to the grand prix itself, teams would often run roughly in rank order of performance.

But as F1 cars evolve over the years, so too does the calendar. And now, the Barcelona circuit may not be the bellweather track it once was. As Fernando Alonso pointed out, that is partly due to the rising number of street circuits.

“I think now we have a lot of ‘Bakus’, ‘Miamis’, ‘Las Vegases’,” Alonso said of the current calendar to the official F1 channel after Friday practice. “So to come here, maybe there are six or seven venues the same as Barcelona and 18 that are different. So it’s always a trade-off that you need to make.” Sure enough, last year showed that Spain is no longer a litmus test for the rest of the season.

Yes, Red Bull and Ferrari were the quickest cars over the Spanish Grand Prix weekend in 2023, as they were on average over the season. But only they and the slowest team – Williams – ranked the same in terms of outright performances as they did over the season as a whole.

McLaren performed better here than on average and Alpine, ultimately sixth in the championship, were fourth. Mercedes, who went on to take the runner-up spot in the standings, were only fifth here.

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So whatever the outcome over the rest of this event, don’t assume that this weekend will give us a truly representative order for how the teams fare against one another and what to expect over the bulk of the season to come. Especially when there was so little to separate the field after the opening two practice sessions.

At the end of Friday, Lewis Hamilton’s advantage at the top of the times over Carlos Sainz Jnr’s Ferrari in second was just 0.022s. Eight drivers lapped within half a second of the Mercedes driver’s best time and the top 16 in the field within a full second. It followed a pattern of incredibly close competition across all categories in Barcelona, where the combined pole margins in qualifying across Formula 2, F3 and F1 Academy amounted to less than a tenth of a second.

While Hamilton was quickest in a practice session for the second consecutive weekend, Mercedes also appeared to be pleased with his high-fuel run late in the session on the soft compound. After taking the chequered flag and asking race engineer Peter Bonnington “how was the pace?”, Bonnington replied: “yeah, we are pretty happy with that pace”, suggesting the team’s Montreal form may not have been a false dawn.

“The car’s feeling really, really great today,” Hamilton said after the session. “It doesn’t feel like we’re too far off. I wouldn’t really take too much notice of lap times necessarily but I think the car’s definitely in a better place.”

Red Bull are, of course, the presumptive team to be every weekend unless otherwise. Although Sergio Perez struggled with the balance of his car in both sessions and was down in 13th by the end of the day and Max Verstappen sat fifth behind Pierre Gasly’s Alpine, Verstappen’s long run pace on both the softs and mediums looked encouraging for the championship leader. Only Lando Norris maintained a better pace than car number one in the high-fuel runs, but the McLaren driver only ran a handful of representative laps compared to most of his rivals who pushed for much longer.

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But perhaps the biggest story of the day was how tyre wear appeared to be at a higher level than many expected. Midway through his first run on mediums in the second session, Verstappen complained his tyres were “completely cooked” but was encouraged to continue by race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase.

“It’s still useful learning, Max,” he said. “This would only be lap 10 of the race.”

Pirelli pointed to the warm weather and track temperature sitting just shy of 50C for adding “further stress to tyres that are already subjected to some of the highest lateral forces of the whole season,” while insisting that they had not seen anything “particularly surprising” out of the data from the opening day.

But the softs were used so sparingly in the race here last year, and high degradation indicates the teams will again rely on the two harder compounds for the race once again.

Before that, however, they must first set the grid for Sunday. Although Hamilton ended Friday fastest, it’s hard not to consider as Verstappen as still the favourite for the top spot on Saturday. However Perez’s weekend hasn’t begun well, and he has a three-place grid penalty for Sunday, meaning Verstappen is likely to be fighting on his own at the front again.

Add to that the fastest Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren being covered by just a few hundredths of a second, it seems that the top four teams could be extremely close to each other in Q3 on Saturday. With that, the pressure will only increase on the drivers as a small mistake or failure to extract the most out of a lap could be the difference between starting on the front row of the grid and the fourth.

Although it’s difficult to be sure who will end up on pole, the one thing that is likely is that it will be another incredibly close margin.

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Combined practice times

P.	#	Driver	Team	FP1 time	FP2 time	Gap	Laps
1	44	Lewis Hamilton	Mercedes	1’14.911	1’13.264		56
2	55	Carlos Sainz Jnr	Ferrari	1’14.572	1’13.286	0.022	61
3	4	Lando Norris	McLaren-Mercedes	1’14.228	1’13.319	0.055	58
4	10	Pierre Gasly	Alpine-Renault	1’15.484	1’13.443	0.179	48
5	1	Max Verstappen	Red Bull-Honda RBPT	1’14.252	1’13.504	0.240	56
6	16	Charles Leclerc	Ferrari	1’15.434	1’13.597	0.333	48
7	81	Oscar Piastri	McLaren-Mercedes	1’14.867	1’13.622	0.358	57
8	63	George Russell	Mercedes	1’14.614	1’13.722	0.458	59
9	31	Esteban Ocon	Alpine-Renault	1’15.086	1’13.766	0.502	60
10	77	Valtteri Bottas	Sauber-Ferrari	1’15.472	1’13.924	0.660	54
11	20	Kevin Magnussen	Haas-Ferrari	1’15.644	1’14.021	0.757	62
12	27	Nico Hulkenberg	Haas-Ferrari		1’14.053	0.789	29
13	11	Sergio Perez	Red Bull-Honda RBPT	1’14.692	1’14.081	0.817	51
14	14	Fernando Alonso	Aston Martin-Mercedes	1’15.222	1’14.091	0.827	54
15	22	Yuki Tsunoda	RB-Honda RBPT	1’15.916	1’14.211	0.947	52
16	3	Daniel Ricciardo	RB-Honda RBPT	1’15.580	1’14.257	0.993	59
17	24	Zhou Guanyu	Sauber-Ferrari	1’15.616	1’14.345	1.081	45
18	18	Lance Stroll	Aston Martin-Mercedes	1’15.512	1’14.402	1.138	56
19	23	Alexander Albon	Williams-Mercedes	1’15.417	1’14.807	1.543	59
20	2	Logan Sargeant	Williams-Mercedes	1’15.752	1’15.070	1.806	58
21	50	Oliver Bearman	Haas-Ferrari	1’15.865		2.601	29

Teams’ progress vs 2023

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