The Athletic

The race is on, and we're going to see a very different build-up to the 2020-6 season for the new regulations,

with the usual rhythm of launches disrupted by the behind closed doors first test.

So what should you expect, and will it make preseason harder to read than ever?

I'm Ed Straw, and joining me to tell all are John Noble and Josh Suttle.

Well, John, we'll come to you first.

Some fans absolutely love launch season, can't get enough of it.

Others to ride it.

Where do you stand?

I think probably a foot in both camps, actually.

I love the fact that, you know, it's all that excitement about seeing new cars, new designs, the differences, you know, have teams exploited gray areas in the rules of some people done things differently.

And you got all that kind of intrigue and mystery and unanswered questions, which are quite good.

But on the flip side, I also find launch events really frustrating because basically the narrative is people can't tell you what they've got in front of them because the cars haven't run for the first time. So it's impossible for drivers and teams to make any

firm prediction on what you've got in front of you. So they end up being this kind of this

mixed, mixed bag of both excitement, the excitement and the intrigue of not knowing what's coming,

but then the frustration of them not being able to tell you anything about what they've done. That's probably heightened as well, being a new rules change as well. In a regular year, usually I think you can skip a lot of launches, really, especially a year like last year where there aren't many changes. But this year where there are so many changes, and I think everyone's scrambling around for any little nugget of information, it does kind of make the launches a bit more of interested viewing because there is just, we really don't know what to expect. We could find things, even just little glimpses are going to tell you a lot more probably this year than in previous years. But that will probably also, I guess, make the teams even more secretive. If you think back to the 22, the last kind of era rule change, I think there was Red Bull that, you know, came out of this car that was kind of claimed to be real and clearly wasn't. There's going to be all sorts of that, isn't there where we're going to get, we can't even trust teams when they say, look, this is the real car or this is a real part of the car because there's going to be all those kind of games going on. The way I always think of it is obviously you have to be very open-minded about what you see in launches. And launch season and pre-season testing are all kind of merged into one more so than ever this year because of that first test that we'll talk about in a bit more detail later on. But I think of it as you've basically got a big knowledge bucket to fill

up about an F1 season in terms of how the cars are and everything. And right now it's pretty much

empty. But the launches are the first start for putting those little bits of knowledge fluid into

the bucket. And then gradually that will fill up over the year. So if you go in with the view of at a launch,

for example, you're definitely going to see all the secrets of a car. Well, you're not, but not getting

everything doesn't mean you don't get something. And it's not just what you see in the car.

Often, if you really pay attention to what is being said, and obviously we do that a lot and we

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