The race is off, and now the dust has settled on pre-season testing with Red Bull seemingly on top and Mercedes in the unfamiliar position of chasing.

But is that an accurate picture?

I'm Ed Sture and joining me to discuss how testing form might or might not translate into racing reality,

our Karun Chandok and Scott Mitchell.

Hello.

Welcome back, Karun. Good to have you back on the podcast. We were both out in Bahrain. I'm still here, actually.

And I must admit, I didn't have particularly high hopes heading out here, given the carryover cars and everything.

But it's actually been an unexpectedly intriguing preseason, hasn't it? It has. You know, I think we've just gotten

so used to the fact that we go to Barcelona testing, Mercedes-Rosa car or the truck and

smashes out, you know, 800 kilometers in the first day of testing, and everyone either gets excited about a false

storm from Ferrari or like last year we all get depressed about how far ahead Mercedes

are this year it was a very unexpected twist wasn't it you know Mercedes reliability troubles

and and the car not quite looking hooked up certainly on day day, say, one and a half, days one and a half.

They came back and, of course, they will be back.

But it does look like heading into the first race.

The Red Bull seemed to be right up there.

A very exciting prospects.

And Scott, you've certainly been enjoying Bahrain, albeit in a virtual sense,

both through covering testing remotely and the fact you took your first sim racing victory in the GPVWC

challenge series. Finally, some success. Yeah, it's been a long time coming. I actually,

there was one specific thing from F1 testing that I could genuinely apply to the second round of the

Formula Challenge season, which was watching, as actually watching Max Verstappen's line

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