Our winter break has officially ended with testing in Bahrain, now it's time to get back on track and race.
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| Photo: Loren Elliott |
After two weeks, we move from Bahrain to Melbourne, Australia, where the first race of this season will take place. Australia will open the season for the first time since 2019, before that it was, for example, Austria in 2020 or Bahrain 2021-2024.
We are probably facing the start of a very tight season, also because this year is the last in which the current technical rules apply, which means that the teams are more balanced, and the engineers are pushing their cars to the absolute limit of what the rules themselves allow.
As for the grid, only two teams have not changed their driver line-up - Aston Martin and McLaren. There will also be a lot of new faces from Junior Formula 2, four in total - Kimi Antonelli, who will replace Lewis at Mercedes, the second is Ollie Bearman, who will move to Haas, but he has already completed several races even at Ferrari itself in Saudi Arabia. The third is Isack Hadjar, who will replace Liam Lawson at VCARB. The last is Gabriel Bortoleto, who will race alongside Nico Hulkenberg at Sauber.
We will only be able to tell how the individual teams will fare after the race itself, but the tests themselves could also tell us something. We can certainly consider the now champion McLaren as the leader, behind it it will be a big unknown, but according to speculation from the paddock it seems that Mercedes and Ferrari are not doing badly at all. However, we cannot write off Red Bull either, although they struggled a bit during the tests, Max Verstappen himself said that he does not expect them to fight for victory in Melbourne: "I don't think we could fight for victory in Melbourne, but I hope we can improve over the course of a few races," said Max. When asked how many teams could fight for the title, he said: "At the moment only one, and that team is orange! That's a very nice colour of course, but from our side, we still have work to do. Other teams want to see some improvements as well, I think, so at the moment one team is clearly in front."
Photo: Jiří Křenek
Behind them, it looks like a battle between Alpine and Williams, who looked promising during testing thanks to the new addition to the team in the form of Carlos Sainz. We could also put Aston Martin on the same level, as this will be their last year with Mercedes engines, as they will be a factory team with Honda engines from next year.
This is how the TOP five teams could look like, the question of whether it will really be like this will be answered only after Sunday's race. Of course, the biggest question mark is without a doubt Lewis Hamilton, who shocked everyone with his transfer and this year is supposed to compete with Charles Leclerc and bring Ferrari back to the title.
Anyway, we have another great season ahead of us, so let's enjoy it.