Formula 1 2026 Barcelona shakedown Day 1 Report

The test started in damp and cold conditions but the weather improved as the day progressed.

As it turned out, Isack Hadjar ended the day at the top of the timing screens with a fastest time of 1:18.159, which is meaningless, to be honest, as the Frenchman was over four seconds slower than the best time clocked in FP1 of the 2025 Spanish Grand Prix.

George Russell was over half a second behind Hadjar in second, while Franco Colapinto was third fastest in the Alpine.

Kimi Antonelli was fourth fastest as he shared the driving duty with Russell at Mercedes, while Esteban Ocon was fifth fastest in the Haas.

Liam Lawson was driving for Racing Bulls and put in the sixth fastest time ahead of Cadillac's Valtteri Bottas, who was seventh fastest.

Gabriel Bortoleto was eighth fastest for Audi, while Sergio Perez was ninth in the Cadillac.

Moving on to the important stuff, mileage, which is the target of all teams as they look to collect data and get to understand their cars and confirm their reliability.

Having said that, Haas ended the day on top, as Ocon was a busy man and managed 154 laps in his VF-26.

Haas team boss Ayao Komatsu told F1TV: “To do 67 laps on the Day 1 morning was really, really good. Now we can start looking a bit more into details.

“Now that we are running, we are discovering issues, problems we need to solve, every lap, every run. But that’s what we are here for, right?

"At least we are running; that means we are gathering data, we are identifying issues that we need to solve.

"Still, obviously we just got started, but I’m very, very happy how we started," the Japanese engineer concluded. 

Antonelli commented after driving his W17: "Well, it still will take a bit of time to try all the modes, you know, overtake, override, all that kind of stuff—it's different.

"But the car is nice; it's very nice to drive, and obviously on the PU side it's a bit different compared to what we had last year; it requires a bit more management, but it's all doable," he added.

The Italian, along with his teammate, managed to rack up 149 laps for Mercedes, while Hadjar managed 107 laps in the RB22.

Hadjar told F1 TV:  “It was pretty productive. Surprisingly we managed to do a lot more laps than we expected. Everything went pretty smooth.

“We had only minor issues, so it’s quite impressive considering it’s our first day with our own engine, so that was definitely smooth.”

That must have been encouraging for the energy drinks outfit since that meant their first ever F1 power unit ran well without any issues, which was confirmed by the 88 laps Lawson managed in the VCARB 03.

Colapinto in the Mercedes-powered Alpine went around the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya 60 times. Not bad for the team that ended the 2025 F1 season last in the Constructors' Championship.

It was the best of days for the new teams, Audi and Cadillac. The former suffered from an issue early in the day, which meant Bortoleto managed only 27 laps.

Audi boss Jonathan Wheatley commented on the issue and said: "We had a technical issue with the car.

"We spotted it, decided to switch the car off on track. We've got plenty of testing this year, and we wanted to really understand the problem, so we've been carefully analyzing that," he added.

Bortoleto added on F1 TV:  “It was I would say a bit of a short day. We were doing a pretty decent job in the morning, putting some laps on board, testing some things. We were going in the right direction.

“But as we all expected, it is a shakedown – everything can happen, and we expect to find issues here and there in the car.

"We found a couple of problems that unfortunately put us out of the day from the morning, so I didn’t run much today.

"But it was expected, these types of thing – we are finding everything now to hopefully not find it in the next test or in the first race of the year."

Things were not any better for Cadillac, as they only managed a total of 44 laps, with Bottas putting in 33 in the morning session.

Perez, on the other hand, had a tough afternoon session, managing only 11 laps.

While Audi caused the early red flag, Colapinto also suffered from an issue in his Alpine and stopped on track, but the Enstone squad managed to bounce back.

Ferrari and McLaren were absent from Day 1 as per their running and development plans while Aston Martin did not show up and did not even announce their plans until later in the day when they issued a statement announcing that they will run on the final two days only.

Williams also were missing and will not make the trip to Barcelona at all as they seem to be struggling with the development of their FW48.