A bad week or the dark horse from F1 testing?

OPINION: While several teams made huge improvements on their testing times of one year ago, Alpine went against the grain and proved slightly slower. But rather than a cause for alarm, as it elected against making performance runs, the team is cautiously optimistic that it will be at the head of the midfield pack come the weekend

If headline times were the only thing that mattered from testing, then there would be one team you would expect to be pretty depressed after the Bahrain Formula 1 test. After all, if you wanted a quick snapshot of the progress everyone has made over the winter, then comparing the fastest times from last year’s test to this one should be a good starting point.

Some have made a significant jump – with Williams, Aston Martin, Alfa Romeo and Mercedes all two seconds faster than they managed to go 12 months ago. Stuck at the bottom of the comparison rankings was Alpine, which was the only squad not to have made an improvement on the stopwatch from last year. In fact, it was 0.064 seconds slower and was bottom of the rankings.

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Author Jonathan Noble

Jonathan Noble is Motorsport.com’s Formula 1 editor. Having graduated from University of Sussex Jonathan worked for sports news agency Collings Sports reporting on F1, F3, touring cars and other sports, with articles appearing in The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, Reuters, Autosport and other publications. In 1999 he moved to Haymarket Publishing to become a senior editor at Autosport Special Projects, and one year later he became Autosport’s grand prix editor. In 2015 he moved to Motorsport Network, becoming the F1 editor for Motorsport.com. He is also a member of the Guild of Motoring Writers, and sits on the FIA Media Council.

Jonathan has won multiple awards for journalism - in 1991 he was the winner of the Guild of Motoring Writers’ Sir William Lyons’ Award for young journalists, in 2010 he was awarded the Outstanding Individual accolade for consumer journalism in the Haymarket wards, in 2011 he won Haymarket’s Scoop of the Year, and in 2018 he was awarded a prestigious Medaglia d’Oro at the Lorenzo Bandini Awards for his contribution to F1 journalism.