The race is on and the 2021 Formula One season blasted into life with the first day of pre-season testing in Bahrain.

But unusually, it was Mercedes in the walls on day one, while Red Bull and Max Verstappen set the pace.

I'm Ed Struhe and joining me to look back at all the action at Gary Anderson and Mark Hughes. Well, Gary, it's a bit different for you as you're not on the ground here in Bahrain, primarily because the COVID restrictions mean you wouldn't be able to get anywhere near the cars anyway. So what's the point? But there's been no lack of technical intrigue, has there, given the amount of stuff you've been writing for the racist website and the amount I've been bothering you today about things? No, no, lots of technical stuff, but the most interesting thing, I think, was a sandstorm. I mean, you could have been in the beats there, couldn't you? It was, I mean, that has to upset everything. The wind was, was, was quite high level, and the sand obviously changed the grip levels levels dramatically so um yeah a difficult test for

everybody i think but you know we saw a bit more of what the cars look like right at this point in

time if you took a snapshot today that was that was what we had um and their performance was what they

had obviously fuel load wise in that we've got really new ideas.

But it was a tough day, so I think that everybody kept their head down. And, you know,

sensible lapse from everybody, no stupid mistakes. Everything looked okay. And as I say,

it's nice to see the cars fully up to running performance speed and technically at that level.

Yeah, I'm told that the weather conditions will be a little bit better tomorrow,

so we'll see how that goes on.

But Mark, you've also been following from afar while I've been dealing with the flying sand

here in Bahrain, not the ideal conditions for testing,

but as I'm sure we'll get to in a minute,

there's still a little bit to be learned from today.

A little bit, yeah. Obviously, pretty wildly skewed by several things, the sandstorm among them,

the wind, and the fact that Mercedes ended up being sort of half a day behind everyone else. And so, yeah, it's difficult to gauge

everyone else when you're not sure where Mercedes is at because for sure it's not at where

it appears to be in the in the timesheets. But yeah, we saw, we saw enough to have some more maybe focus questions rather than any definitive answers.

It's difficult to believe that Mercedes are where they are and obviously they had a gearbox problem, so they lost half a day as such.

But it did seem that the second half of the day was actually slightly faster than the first half of

the day even through all that sand the track there's got a lot of grip so it's not as bad as

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