The Athletic

The Races

The Races on and Mercedes showed ominous form in Barcelona testing by topping the third day of running

as Williams revealed a little more about the reason for its absence.

But what of McLaren's debut today? And how big a setback was Isaac Hadjar's Tuesday shunt?

I'm Edgshaw and joining me for testing talk, is Scott Mitchell Mown.

Well, Scott, what do you make of it? Looking ominous, it's early to use the word ominous,

but certainly Mercedes are going pretty well.

Andrew Shufflin even said that they're actually ahead of where they're expected to be in terms of the running,

and the main interruptions have actually been other people causing red flags,

which is a good place to be after their second day of running.

Yeah, you could so easily construe that shoveling quote is basically saying

all these pesky other idiots that aren't as good and prepared as us are ruining our test.

Now, obviously, shoveling and Mercedes wouldn't use quite such language to describe what other

teams are doing. And as a general rule, actually, the teams have performed extremely well this week in

terms of mileage and getting stuff done to the point where if you removed Mercedes from the

picture you would say wow this is seriously impressive from all the teams to be you know pushing close

to a hundred laps a day or some teams are even going just over 100 laps.

Obviously, Hass did 154 on day one.

You'd be like, wow, these numbers are incredible.

And then Mercedes on day three knocks out, was it over 180 laps between their two drivers.

I think Kimmy Antonelli might have even done a race simulation as well.

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