Formula 1’s first pre-season test was never going to make or break any team’s 2026 season, but some will clearly be happier than others with the five-day event, of which teams could do three days of running.
Here’s our picks for the biggest winners and losers from F1 2026’s first collective running…
Winner: Mercedes
Until this week, the 'Mercedes is 2026 favourite' narrative was slightly more about whispers and reputation than hard facts.
What it had done in 2014, paddock rumours about how well 2026 prep was going. It was persuasive and rooted in logic, but still a little nebulous.
Now it's fact. It wasn't just that the Mercedes ran and ran and ran all week. It wasn't just the hints of awesome pace or talk from the lucky few who could see the track - with fans and media not allowed at this test - about how good it looked.
It was how little the drivers' and team personnel's optimism was contained, even in the very carefully curated interview snippets released.
When McLaren referred to what a high bar some rivals were setting, it was pretty obvious who it meant. - Matt Beer
Loser: F1 building 2026 goodwill
A not-inconsiderable part of myself has really enjoyed this kind of first test for a change - unbroadcast, not publicly-timed, the new cars available in only glimpses, laptimes coming out in bursts, the internet engaged in (largely good-faith) speculation and excitement.
But ultimately the taste is sour, and the refreshing novelty of the test's cloak-and-dagger nature can't quite overcome the feeling that F1 and its teams have made themselves the villains here.
Your championship is riding such a high, and people are so keen to get back into it after a short off-season, that there's a frenzy over mere glimpses of these cars - most of which we will get sick of seeing by FP1 of round 24 - doing unrepresentative laps on a cold track.
And that frenzy, that excitement was rewarded by an excessive security crackdown and a tightly-controlled centralised flow of information more befitting of something outside of the realm of sports.
I personally didn't really need to know more about how the shakedown went. I wouldn't have lost sleep over knowing much less.
But I hate the message this sends. I hate the idea that F1 pre-season, which is clearly a product in itself now, is meant to be consumed through tightly-curated launches of nothing-burger buzzwords, liveries-on-show cars and speeches by team CEOs about how much they value the synergy with their software-partner-du-jour rather than what we're all here for, which is fast, new cars being driven at speed and bettered from day to day. - Valentin Khorounzhiy
Winner: Ferrari
Mercedes totally overshadowed the other teams throughout testing…until Ferrari went fastest right on the last day and showed the futility of worrying about laptimes!
Yes, Mercedes had started the test well and got a lot of miles in. But Ferrari’s not totally out of that mileage ballpark. It was already shaping up to be our 'sleeper hit' of testing before Lewis Hamilton's headline-grabbing time.
Its basic car doesn’t appear to be missing any tricks compared to the others - engine compression ratio saga aside - we know it's got big updates to come and it ran pretty flawlessly all week.
Its power unit has done a good amount of mileage across its customers too, and there have been very few issues. The fastest time was the icing on the cake.
It hasn’t come out and smashed this test out of the park quite like Mercedes has - and Mercedes might have had more in the locker than it showed. But the aim of this season is to win races and the championship, not testing. And Ferrari has started its mission to do that very decently. - Jack Benyon
Loser - Williams
Williams team boss James Vowles' explanation for his squad's absence from the Barcelona week contained plenty of understandable logic, and his descriptions of the virtual testing being done to minimise the pain of missing this week did too. There is actually plenty of testing this year, this need not torpedo Williams's season.
But in the context of everything Williams has said and how it's conducted itself in the build-up to 2026, its absence from this test was a terrible, terrible look.
So much of its restructuring, recruitment and rebuilding had been based on writing off the tail end of the last era to focus on leaping much closer to the front in the new one.
Given all of that and how open Williams had been about parking 2025 development to focus on 2026, if there was one team you'd have put money on being first out of the pitlane when Barcelona testing began, it was this one.
And it wasn't even at the track. - MB
Winner: Red Bull Powertrains
This is a big season for Red Bull, whose engines will need to prove themselves before millions - but most crucially before an audience of one. Chances are high Max Verstappen will have contractual flexibility to go his own way for 2027 if he so desires, and Red Bull Powertrains will be a key multiplier for any such decision.
We don't know yet if it's a competitive engine. We do, increasingly, know it's a healthy one. It is already almost certainly not an embarrassment - it's been running and running and running without major dramas in the Red Bull car and the Racing Bulls car, with mileage numbers that have proven unachievable to fellow newcomer Audi or the late-arriving Honda.
The drivers really seem to like it. The rivals have taken note. That positive feeling could crumble in Bahrain, or in Melbourne, but the 'we're ready for this' message has been sent and received. - VK
Loser: Audi
Perhaps this entry is a little harsh, considering Audi's test did steadily improve - statistically speaking - as the week went on. Just 27 laps were recorded on day one, but it completed more than five times that number - 145 laps between its two drivers - on its final day of running.
So, in the end, it comfortably avoided the worst-case scenario that it might've feared when Nico Hulkenberg stopped on track (with what turned out to be a hydraulic leak) early on Wednesday. And technical director James Key insisted it would've been a "very pleasant surprise" had Audi "run faultlessly from the outset".
Still, if performance wasn't the objective, Audi could undoubtedly have done with a little more running. Not least considering it was ready - and eager - to be at the end of the pitlane at 9am on day one.
This is a really big undertaking for Audi. There's no suggestion it's underestimating that. But every lap counts at this stage and, Honda aside, Audi's behind its manufacturer rivals in its key area of focus at this point. - JC
Winner: Teams' reliability
This is obviously headlined by Mercedes' impressive mileage, but almost every team and manufacturer will be walking away from this test with a degree of reason to be cheerful.
There was more "jeopardy", as Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin put it, and there were red flags on day one - unlike in the previous two years.
But there was nothing that constituted anything like the kind of crisis that was feared months ago, and that led to this being a closed test, and no repeat of the spluttering start to the first test when the turbo-hybrid engines were first introduced 12 years ago.
Back in 2014, eight teams between them managed a combined 93 laps on day one at Jerez. At Barcelona this year? Seven teams racked up 631 laps between them. And the figures only got more impressive thereafter.
So, well done to the teams and engine manufacturers for those efforts. But that also serves to shove the PR own-goal of the test's behind-closed-doors nature further into the spotlight... - JC
Loser: F1 teams' secrecy
Part of the logic of F1's test being private was so that teams could have privacy to test and develop their raw 2026 machines, without the prying eyes of fans or the media.
But The Race understands some teams were irritated with just how much slipped out of the test.
Whether it be the live timing that was widely shared on social media on the opening day (before being shut down) or photos leaking out of the pitlane, there's been very little privacy that the teams supposedly wanted.
Teams might have hoped to keep some things under wraps until the Bahrain test next week, but anything debuted on track this week has been snapped and shared across the world plenty of times.
It's good evidence that a secret collective F1 test in this day and age, just really doesn't work.
Information and photos always slip out, the test being private just means F1 teams had even less control over it than they thought they would. - Josh Suttill
