F1 testing underway as Hamilton expects a tougher Ferrari challenge

With the first Grand Prix of the 2019 season in Melbourne, Australia under a month away, the ten teams competing for this year’s World Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships have been testing their new cars in four days of pre-season testing.

There have been a number of changes to both the teams and rosters between seasons with several new drivers who will be lining up on the grid on March 17th. Force India have completed their transition after being bought in August 2018 and will now race under the name Racing Point.

Sauber has also seen a name change this time through a sponsorship deal, and have been renamed Alfa Romeo Racing. Alfa Romeo’s two drivers will be Kimi Raikkonen, who has swapped his place at Ferrari with Charles Leclerc, and Antonio Giovinazzi, who raced twice in 2017 while Pascal Wehrlein was injured.

Two British drivers will be joining the pack this season, both promoted from Formula 2. F2 champion George Russell joins Williams alongside Robert Kubica. Polish driver Kubica returns after an eight-year absence from F1, following a horrific crash at the Ronde di Andora rally in 2011 that left doctors fighting to save his hand.

The other British driver is 19-year-old Lando Norris who came second in last season’s F2 Championship. He will race with Carlos Sainz at McLaren after Fernando Alonso decided to retire. Norris and Russell will be hoping they can rise to the same level as five-time World Champion and Mercedes Driver Lewis Hamilton.

Ferrari had the superior car last season but a slew of bad racing decisions – which Hamilton capitalised on – allowed him to win by a margin of 88 points. The Brit thinks that it will be a lot harder to retain the title this season though: “Ferrari are very strong. It appears they have a better package than last year, which means it will be a bigger challenge for us. They have been looking great. We have just been digging deep, trying to understand the car, pretty much the same as the beginning of every year.

“Ferrari always look strong, particularly the last few years; they looked strong right at the beginning, so that’s to be expected. It has been normal. I am competing with everyone. I don’t know who’s going to be quickest. You can’t say just Ferrari. You don’t know where the Red Bulls are. Who knows what people are going to bring up for the first race.”

While nine of the teams were testing their cars in the first two days of testing, one was surprisingly absent. Williams did not manage to get a Russell or Kubica on the track until day three, giving their rivals massive advantages.

Williams’ deputy team principal Claire Williams said: “It’s not a situation that we anticipated, or that we ever wanted to find ourselves in. We’re not just disappointed. It’s embarrassing not bringing a race car to a circuit when everyone else has managed to do that, particularly a team like ours that has managed to bring a race car to testing for the past 40-odd years.”

“We’ve missed two days of testing, and that’s not ideal. That’s a lot of potential kilometres, but I don’t think that we will actually know the full impact of having missed those days until probably a bit later on.”

“Clearly we’re doing everything we can to condense the programme that we had, to make sure that we maximised the time available and we really focused our efforts and attention on the most important and critical areas to make sure the car is in the best shape possible for Australia.”

Perhaps the biggest change to F1 this season will be seen after the season has begun. The first day of the Bahrain Grand Prix in March is also the deadline for the UK to make a decision on Brexit. With eight of the ten teams based in south-east England there is the potential for a lot of problems.

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said that “a no-deal Brexit would have a major impact on our operations going to races and developing cars. We have certain contingencies in place, like having more stock and thinking about how we would get parts and people in and out of the country.”

“But it would be a disruption and it would cause all the UK teams a lot of headache, while Ferrari in Italy and Sauber (Alfa Romeo) in Switzerland would have a massive advantage over every UK-based team.”