Wednesday marked the first time that the 2022 cars have been seen as intended after some teams chose to debut a show vehicle over the last few weeks, keeping the technical innovations under wraps.
All 10 teams are in action for the preseason tests, putting on full display which teams succeeded with innovations during the offseason and which ones need to make some changes before the Bahrain Grand Prix in March. McLaren and Ferrari came out strong. Friendly reminder: teams might purposefully skew their speeds to hide their outright performance levels, holding onto any competitive advantage they can. Not to mention, it was two sessions, meaning different times of the day leave the track in different conditions and temperatures vary. , who finished the day with the fastest lap at 1:19.568, hinted at that, jokingly tweeting, “Productive day, but annoyed I’m P1. Now you gonna think we fast and waaaaay over hype us. Omegalul.
With the warning in mind, McLaren and Ferrari both broke out of the midfield, sweeping the top three by the end of the afternoon session. Norris, the lone McLaren driver for the day, clocked in 103 laps while Leclerc and Carlos Sainz split the sessions for a combined 153 laps. “The initial feeling is not bad, but we shouldn’t get carried away by the timesheets today, as these are early days and everyone is still hiding their true form,” Leclerc said,. “It’s impossible to have a clear picture just yet, so we have to stay focused and keep working hard. We put in a lot of laps, more than any other team today, and that’s a positive we will build on.”