The race is on and while today in Barcelona was all about testing, we have seen all

10 cars together on track at last. But what can we actually learn from day one of testing? I'm

your host, Ed Straw, and joining me to answer that question

are Mark Hughes and Gary Anderson. Mark, finally turned up. I think this is our 13th podcast.

We've been waiting for so long. You're welcome. Yeah, thank you. We've got you down from the

wild north to offer your insight. Yeah, I'll carry on. You're just trying to make sure everyone can understand what words you're saying. And Gary Anderson, another first day of testing for you. Yeah, another first day of testing for me. I've been here for a few of them. Interesting day because, you know, to be honest, it's the first day of testing, and we had, I don't know how many cars run there was different drivers changing at

lunchtime but there was 10 teams running obviously a single car each when they changed their drivers at

lunchtime but nothing stopped they just kept going um I don't think there was a red a red flag I told you

in the whole day I mean that's just absolutely incredible for the how complex these cars are and how they come up from sort of

different directions to achieve the same goal from from a team point of view to get that

reliability on day one is pretty impressive do you think it might have been that the restriction

to six days over the two weeks rather than eight has really focused their minds on getting everything

running straight away so they don't waste any valuable time so they don't run out of performance

testing time um yeah it is but you know it's always the things that you haven't quite done right

that catch you out so uh you know again just the planning and trying to make sure that doesn't

happen is it's quite tough so you know i have to pat them all in the back for it. I know what it's like cars are, you know, you have reliability problems. And we've seen it here through the years. I mean, 2014, when we first got these new regulations, you know, for the first morning, nobody left the pits. They just couldn't get out of the garage really. So just a whole different

dimension. And it's all part of the fact that, you know, now they're so geared up to run all

the stuff on test rigs or some sort mechanical test rigs. I mean, we say it's six days testing.

But, you know, I think, you know, Honda can put a complete car on a rig and run the gearbox

and engine, the whole thing running.

So that's the sort of reliability stuff that lets you down.

And really, the equipment that the teams have now is just second to none.

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