The Athletic

The Races

The race is on and heading into the final three days of preseason running before the Australian

Grand Prix, there's still a lot of work to be done.

So what is every team's priority

for this week and who is most up against it? I'm Ed Strawn joining me to set the scene for the

second Bahrain test, our Scott Mitchell Malm and Samarth Canal. Well, we've got a very simple

concept today. We've got 11 teams now. We're going to run through each of them with our

top priority for them to work on in the final test. Of course, the reality is they'll all be working

on a huge amount, but we want to pick out one main storyline. So Scott, we'll start with you.

We've got McLaren first. I've got Close the Energy Management Gap. Yep, I think that's valid. It's been something we've

been hearing for a while in the build-up to testing, this idea that these 2026 cars and engines

confer a big benefit to the works teams, big by modern F1 standards at the front. So basically you have the usual integration elements,

everything's designed around the power unit, everything's sort of done in-house la Red Bull or

Ferrari or very, very close, like for example, Mercedes, Brackley and Britsworth. But because

the energy recovery and deployment demands are everything for this formula, the

teams, the works teams will have had sight of everything at the earliest possible opportunity.

They'll be so, it'll be so embedded in everything they know about the 2026 cars and engines.

And you're seeing that now that we've got the cars on track in testing.

The Mercedes just looks more refined than the McLaren does.

It's quite obvious watching the McLaren track side that it's not quite as clean in terms of

not necessarily power delivery, because obviously it's not like they're running drastically

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