Barcelona F1 testing: Testing shows Mercedes still on pole

Hamilton and team-mate Rosberg clock up the laps in Barcelona and look good but Vettel gives Ferrari hope with faster times

Nico Rosberg drove more than 800km on one day in Barcelona, doing 172 laps of the Circuit de Catalunya in his new Mercedes (Getty Images)

From virtual launches we moved straight to the “breaking cover” phase of the Formula One year. The first test of the season is always one of unbreakable excitement, the suggestion that something new might impact on the order of things counting for more than it should in the imagination of devotees.

The sight of Sebastian Vettel nailing his Ferrari to the top of the time sheets on the first two days in Barcelona offered headline nirvana but drill into the numbers and the big red glow was shot through with silver. Yes, the iron certainty of the Mercedes machine sent a shudder across the paddock, racking up five race distances over the first two days without a blip.

World champion Lewis Hamilton put 156 laps on the clock on day one, half a second behind Vettel’s mark but, with more than twice the distance covered, real significance was his. Nico Rosberg went even deeper on day two, crashing through the 800km barrier, that’s 172 laps in circuit currency.

Though Rosberg was two seconds down on Vettel’s time, his Mercedes was shod in medium compounds, which tyre supplier Pirelli estimate to be up to 2.3sec a lap slower than the ultra-softs that fired Ferrari toward the stars. You do the maths.

Yesterday, Nico Hulkenberg was the pace-setter in the Force India, while Rosberg in the morning and Hamilton in the afternoon continued their race simulations, again covering more ground than any other team. Even accounting for the variable nature of the testing agendas across the grid, Fernando Alonso was not wrong when he identified Mercedes as the standard bearer once more.

“The Mercedes domination has not finished,” Alonso said. “They are very, very strong, and they are doing some interesting days of testing. These first two days, with that amount of laps, means you have very clever things. So when you add the potential, they are stronger than ever, even more than the last two years.”

Music to the ears of Bernie Ecclestone, not. Formula One’s exchequer knows a hard sell when he sees one and used the platform offered this week to drop some incendiary commentary the media’s way. He would not, he said, pay the price of a ticket to take his family to a race. Ecclestone was echoing the sentiment that has clung to the sport since Michael Schumacher began his domination at Ferrari 16 years ago.

Those who suffered under the Schumacher hammer, powered as it was by the revered triumvirate of team principal Ross Brawn, designer Rory Byrne and general manager Jean Todt, must smile at the anguished laments of the present Scuderia hierarchy whinging about the possibility of bringing up a potless decade in 2016.

Ultimately it was the sport’s ruling body, the FIA, under the auspices of president Max Mosley, who engineered the necessary rule changes to shake up the grid. The good-cop, bad-cop connectivity enjoyed by Mosley and Ecclestone ensured the terms of engagement were manipulated to protect against predictability.

That theme continued to a degree when Todt replaced Mosley as president in 2009 and oversaw in 2013 the engine regulation changes that would scupper Red Bull’s aero-led, four-year stranglehold. Today Todt is too much the statesman according to Ecclestone, his eye turned by the road safety lobby in sundry European parliaments to concern himself with the minutiae of F1. The resulting inability to manoeuvre the rulebook to clip the heels of Mercedes exacerbates the problems in a sport inclined too much towards the powerful car manufacturers.

Negotiations aimed at drawing up radical revisions to enliven proceedings next year have run into the dull political stasis that ultimately maintains the status quo. The notion that Mercedes would vote for changes that might allow a rival the wriggle room required to affect a shift in dynamic is risible. And so F1 fiddles about, with cosmetic alterations the only option.

This week’s big idea? A proposed qualifying revamp for 2016 that introduces time constraints in all three sessions but does not fundamentally change a thing. Drivers disappearing every 90 seconds until just two are left is hardly going to reinvigorate if the last pair are always wearing Mercedes livery, as was the case for the bulk of 2015.

So what can we expect in the season ahead? More of the same I’m afraid. Mercedes remains the team to beat. The second four-day test in Barcelona next week, if not today’s final thrash around the Circuit de Catalunya, will surely demonstrate that, with Mercedes releasing the shackles at some point and ripping up the time sheets.

Ferrari’s improvement continues, especially in the hands of Vettel, making the four-time champion the man most likely to take advantage at the circuits where Mercedes cannot make the tyres work quite so well.

Force India appear to have substantiated the improvements made in the second half of last season, when they missed the first test completely. And the McLaren-Honda liaison still looks miles off, with the finger pointing indubitably at an engine that struggled to harvest recoverable energy last year and thus far is noticeably off the pace.