Rankings of the best times achieved during the Barcelona tests

It is Lewis Hamilton who set the fastest time during this 3-day private testing week in Barcelona. He used soft tires, the softest ones from the Pirelli range, but he is very far from his 2021 times.

A range of tires now available in 18 inches.

Pirelli is coming this season with new tires fitted on 18″ rims. The front tires, like last year, are narrower than the rear tires, but what’s more, the shape of the tires, which is more “flat,” provides a completely different level of grip and wear.

Pirelli will come to each Grand Prix as in previous years with 3 different tire compounds among a range of 5 levels of hardness. From the very soft C5 tires to the very hard C1 tires, including soft, medium, and hard options. Intermediate and wet weather tires will also be available if necessary.

Once again this year, the best times are recorded on soft tyres, and in the case of Mercedes, on very soft ones (C5).

Note that two hours on day 3 were dedicated to testing wet and intermediate tires.

Slower times than last year.

The lap times are slower in Barcelona this year with cars supposed to be faster than last year. Lewis Hamilton’s best time this season in Barcelona is…

The time is 1:19.138, for a best lap in qualifying in 2021 at 1:16.741, which is 2.5 seconds slower.

The innovations brought by the new technical regulation bring areas of uncertainty that still need to be perfected by the teams. Simulations predict faster cars by the end of the season compared to last year, but it will take time to make up for this delay.

The match Red Bull vs Mercedes is still there.

If we look at the timesheet, Hamilton set the fastest time with less than 100 milliseconds difference compared to his teammate, Russell, who is new to the team. The Mercedes duo is 4 tenths faster than the third-placed Red Bull of Perez on less grippy tires. Verstappen, in 6th place, set his time on medium tires and is only half a second behind. This means that with identical tires, these two teams would have probably set very close times. However, the development of the cars throughout the season will be an important factor for progress.

Unreadable results.

If Ferrari sets a time that is one tenth faster than Verstappen’s Red Bull on the same medium tires, it does not mean that their use of soft tires would have allowed them to set the fastest time of the week or that they are the fastest. The conditions and the accuracy of the timings cannot be determined until all the cars and teams are operating at 100% capacity. Additionally, the drivers have been running with different amounts of fuel, and the relays performed on tires with varying levels of wear can also alter the actual time sheet.

So we’ll have to wait for the qualifications and the Bahrain Grand Prix to realize it, but in the meantime, we’ve prepared some major trends that can be drawn from these first 3 days of testing.

The ranking of the best times by driver in Barcelona: