Ahead of Formula 1's first 2026 testing event, Sky Sports F1's Bernie Collins answers the key questions surrounding the Barcelona shakedown.

The 11 teams, including new entrant Cadillac, are set to take to the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya from January 26-30, with F1's all-new cars for 2026 hitting the track for the first time. Each team is allowed to run on three of the five days in a schedule of their choosing.

The behind closed doors event in Spain was arranged by the teams to allow them extra preparation time before two further official testing events are held in Bahrain in February ahead of the season-opening Australian Grand Prix on March 8.

Collins, who was head of strategy at Aston Martin during F1's last regulation change in 2022, has provided an insider's account of what will be going on in Barcelona.

How long have the teams been working on these new cars?

There was a regulation that prevented teams from starting work on these cars before the beginning of 2025, but how much resource was dedicated throughout the last year would have been dependent on their philosophy.

It's a question of how quickly they shifted resource away from their 2025 car towards this car. That might be that they started with 10 per cent of the design office and then progressed to 20 per cent, and then gradually shifted more people over. That process happens with every new car in a way, but with this car, it will have happened more quickly and earlier in the year.

Each year teams will shift to the next year's car, start to look at what big improvements they'll make or what areas they want to develop or what issues with the car they're going to tackle, but this is obviously a much bigger step change and some of the learnings from the old car won't necessarily carry across to this one.

As for the engines, the 2026 technical regulations were published in June 2024, so teams have been able to work on the power units since then.

Do works teams have an advantage over customer teams?

When the engines are designed, each team - customer or works - requires the same hardware and software. So, if Mercedes produce five engines, theoretically, the ones that go to Mercedes should be exactly the same as the ones that go to McLaren.

Where the works team has an advantage is if they had a particular design philosophy. For example, they want to put the oil radiator on the right hand side of the car for whatever reason. Then they will work more closely with the integration of the engine, how the pipes are positioned around the engine, where the oil pickup is - whatever the required elements are.

So, it's things like that which sounds little from the outside, but actually, the more that you can integrate your chassis design with the engine design, the lighter the overall package will be.

When I was working at McLaren in 2012-13, we had our engine supplied by Mercedes. At the beginning of the year, Mercedes would send you a CAD (Computer-Aided Design) model of their engine, and you'd put that into your CAD and try to build around it, making sure everything you're designing on the car fits around the engine model you've been given.

But the thing with the customer relationship is that you get that engine model maybe once a week or every two weeks, while for the works team, it's updating live. It's maybe improved over the years, but there's been many instances when you're working around an old version of the engine model, and then a new version comes through and suddenly something doesn't fit. So, it can just slow down the entire design process on the chassis side.

All the teams running a Mercedes engine should have a theoretical advantage from there being four of them, because Mercedes are getting four times as much as data as the likes of Audi and Honda, who will have just one car on track with their engine in it.

How will the cars evolve over the three tests?

As we are getting entirely new cars with the regulation changes, testing time is treble what we've had for the last few years.

The three days of testing each team has in Barcelona, which many of them are describing as a 'shakedown', will be used to make sure that the cars are fundamentally working.

So, you might see that the car that rolled out in Barcelona or test day-one in Bahrain is maybe a simpler car than what you see day three in the last test in Bahrain.

The first cars you see will have a lot more sensors on them, so will be a lot heavier than what they are on the last day. Teams will try to get the car on the last day of testing in Bahrain to match what they expect to run the first day in Melbourne, but that's often quite difficult.

There's more than three weeks between the first day of testing in Barcelona and the last day in Bahrain, so that's three weeks of aero development that teams will have had. Although three weeks doesn't sound like a lot, it is in the wind tunnel! So, they'll have tried to use that time to try to bring new parts for use in the last few days of the final test.

Will the focus in Barcelona be more on reliability than performance?

I think that the focus, particularly in Barcelona, is going to be reliability. There's a new control electronics unit, so a major part of the challenge is going to be integrating those new parts.

In 2014, when the new engine last came in, I remember the Abu Dhabi test in 2013 being horrific, and in 2014, there was a lot of unreliability early on in the season, but I do think teams have moved on quite a lot since then.

Engines will do a lot more on the dynamometer (engine testing device) than they did at that time, so I think the cars should be, or hopefully are, a bit more reliable than they were in 2014, but a track is the best proving ground for that.

The first thing that teams will be keen to do is to get mileage and proof of reliability, because running over kerbs, all those things, we can't totally replicate all of that in dyno land.

Then secondly will come a fundamental understanding of how the car's operating. That would, for example, include a ride height sweep.

Last year, you might have started at what you thought was your optimum ride height and then changed, 5-10 millimetres in either direction.

This year, because it's a brand-new car, there'll be a lot more of that because you don't have historic data to build on. And you have all these simulation models, you've got all your wind tunnel models, but at this point, you don't know if any of that is correct. So, there's going to be a lot more correlation work done rather than performance work.

How will new car elements challenge engineers?

The adjustable front wings for 2026 are going to be quite a big challenge. How is it working in reality? How are you doing a front-wing change? How are you setting that up?

When we first introduced DRS, we had loads of issues with the DRS flap sticking or opening too much or not opening at the right time. So, there's going to be a lot of time spent proving out all these different systems to make sure they are working in a whole host of conditions.

You've got a whole new engine that will have a new oil tank, a new fuel tank, new gearboxes. So, when you're on the last lap of the race, going around a corner like Parabolica at Monza, where the car has got a lot of side loading on it, you need to be sure that the remaining fuel can be picked up from that tank. Can the oil all be picked up? There'll be loads of like reliability tests like that that are blind to us.

That's why years ago we got lots of red flags in testing because people would do a fuel run out test to see how low they could get the fuel. That would usually take place on the last day, but we've not seen it in recent years because people have been confident in their systems. But we're going to go back a little bit, I think, on some of those tests.

What could go wrong?

Nine days of testing for a new car, particularly for a new team like Cadillac, is very little, so anything that creates big downtime is a worry.

Something like an engine or gearbox issue is, in many ways, pretty easy. You take the part out, you fit another one. And the mechanics are pretty well versed at doing that. You fit another one, and you send the car again. And then someone else stands outside and figures out why it failed. So, they can be working on that when the car is still running.

The biggest thing that can go wrong is something with the chassis. It doesn't happen often, but if it does, the chassis is the core of the car and the biggest component to change, and the biggest component to fix quickly.

There's a risk of feeling a little bit helpless as a customer team if something goes wrong with your power unit. You need to let the supplier work on it and figure out what else you can learn with your car.

What information does an engineer want from their driver?

In terms of car performance, it's all about where the limitations are. What is the biggest time loss? How stable is the car? How confident does the driver feel in the car? What is the balance like between high and low speed? Are setup changes having the expected impact?

The drivers will have probably done quite a lot of running in the simulator. So, is what they are experiencing on track matching what happened in the simulator, or if not, why not?

It's going to be quite interesting to see how different engine manufacturers have come up with different solutions to how the drivers manage the boost overtake modes.

In 2014, initially, KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System) was a button that they had to press on the steering wheel. They had to press it every time they wanted to use it, and then over the years, it became more and more automated. We are potentially going to go back to the driver having to do more.

I expect there to be a lot of feedback on where the driver thinks power should be deployed and how fast it comes in or out.

And in terms of aero, a lot of focus will be on these adjustable front wings. How stable does that feel in certain corners or on certain straights? Can they predict what's going to happen?

At the end of any test, practice, qualifying or race, the first question is, what do you need to make the car go faster? And that question, fundamentally, will remain the same. But I think there are going to be much bigger wins available now than we had during last season.

Will teams know where they stand in the pecking order?

It used to be that the best read of where your car sat relative to others was the race simulation that most teams would do on the final day. Knowing cars would be starting at 100kg and ending at 0kg meant you could work out their degradation and many other things. Although even with that, there are many ways that teams can try to hide their true performance.

In the test, the car doesn't need to be a legal weight. It's highly unlikely that teams are going to run underweight, but they could be running significantly overweight. Having an extra 10kg in Barcelona adds three tenths of a second per lap, so it can make a really big difference.

Teams tend to use a lot more GPS rather than raw lap time to track the performance of others - and it's particularly useful for assessing performance in specific parts of a circuit. They can also use sound analysis to pick up what gear a car is in, what RPM they're at, all these sorts of things.

The people that are at the track need to be really focused on their own performance, and leave it to people at the factory to analyse rivals.

Where you really sit in performance comes very late in the test, because people have their car closer to Australia race spec and should have ironed out any major issues.

How much will teams be spying on each other?

All of the teams have their own photographer within the pit lane taking photos of all the other cars. That's standard for every weekend of every race. They won't just be looking at the cars but also equipment in garages. The images all go back into a big database at the factory where it will be analysed.

There will also be photographers specifically placed in the pit lane, where the cars are moving at their slowest, to take photos that can provide an estimate of what ride heights rivals are running at any given time. You might also get overhead shots to assess wheelbases, or things like that.

You have to be careful. We used to always get told to never have a drawing on your screen, never have a setup sheet on your screen revealing the settings that you're running, never have tyre pressures displayed on the wheels - all of these things. You're trying to minimise what's visible for a camera at all times.

If a car comes out with something really stand out, teams will spend a lot of time figuring out what they think it does. If it's exceptional, they'll try and put it through their CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics), and if that comes out as positive, then they will start to explore those sorts of things in the wind tunnel.

It depends on what it is, but the lead time to get something from design to on the car, like a floor part for example, it's still going to be two or three months.

Watch all 24 race weekends from the 2026 Formula 1 season live on Sky Sports F1, starting with the Australian Grand Prix on March 6-8 Stream Sky Sports with NOW - No contract, cancel anytime

read more