Bulls' Guide To: Testing

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Should you ever wish to ponder how much F1 has changed since Red Bull Racing first appeared, you could do worse than look at the testing calendar for our first year in the sport.

Flying On Track

We recorded 53 days of testing between November 24th 2004 and September 30th 2005, completing 33,362km of running. We ran in Barcelona, Valencia and Jerez, with occasional trips to Paul Ricard, Silverstone and Monza.

The R5 and then the RB1 were driven by Tonio Liuzzi, Christian Klien, Neel Jani, David Coulthard and Scott Speed, who between them notched-up 7,317 laps. We had 24 days, spread across eight weeks, in the bag before heading off to our first race in Australia. This year we’ll be having three day in Barcelona, followed by three in Bahrain. Then less than a week later we'll be gracing the Bahrain track again for the first race of the season.

Back in 2005 our mileage was well down in the bottom half of the testing table. At the apex of the pyramid, Ferrari racked up 155 days of testing and 74,375km. Behind them, BAR managed 61k, Toyota 51k and so forth. That was simply the way F1 worked: while the wind tunnels were turning 24/7 and teams were busy securing every last teraflop of simulation they could lay their hands upon, none of it was considered a substitute for taking a car to a track and running it from dawn ‘til dusk.

The downside was the truly vast expense. Teams would build a fleet of cars; they’d have a dedicated test team of mechanics and engineers; they’d be renting circuits for their individual use – or bite the bullet and buy their own track(s).

A View To Get Used To

The mid-2000s were the peak of this largesse, with 2006 seeing 411,012km of testing – excluding practice session running at a grand prix or the days where a team decamped to an airfield to scream up and down a runway. It wasn't sustainable, and curbs were introduced that gradually brought that number down to that which is considered the new normal: two pre-season tests of three or four days, followed by extended stays at three grand prix venues for early-, mid- and end of season tests.

2019 had 14 days of testing in which the ten teams covered 44,589km – little more than a tenth of what had been completed in testing’s heyday.

We’re using 2019 as the modern benchmark because, of course, 2020 saw fewer test days, and 2021 saw fewer again. Last year, the schedule was replaced with three days of testing in Bahrain. The rules for 2021, with 2020’s designs largely carried over, made the task a little simpler.

Sakhir Sunsets

In Pre-Covid Times…

As track testing has become steadily more proscribed, simulation has improved to shoulder more of the burden. It’s led to the modern situation where running the car on track – whether that’s the whole car pre-season, or new parts on Friday mornings – is partly an exercise in validation. Track testing confirms – to a greater or lesser extent – that the results being predicted in simulation and the wind tunnel match what happens in the real world. The team that sees a strong correlation is happy; much less so when the car on track isn’t behaving as predicted.

The extent to which testing can be successfully replicated in the factory varies from discipline to discipline but the area in which the track still has an undisputed mastery is learning about tyres. There’s no substitute for putting in the miles. Most of the set-up work the team will do over the tests is geared to understanding how the tyres work under various conditions: how to get them up to temperature for a qualifying lap; how to keep them cool during a long run; how they perform with a high downforce aero package, what affect taking wing off has on their life and so on.

In an ideal world, the team would get to sample a variety of track types with the full range of different corner profiles and surfaces. As that’s not possible, visiting a well-known circuit with a good mix of corner types makes it possible to extrapolate tyre performance at other tracks, though it remains an inexact science that occasionally leaves every team baffled – though that wildcard element is probably good for the sport.

Quite a few items on the testing checklist are rather more mundane than this. The team will want to do a run-dry test, and discover if the driver can read the display on a bright day, and know how tight the turning circle is when exiting the garage. That’s been calculated at the design stage to ensure the car can get out into even the tightest pit lane – but you still want to tick it off a list in the real world.

When the trackside engineers are putting together a testing programme, they are bombarded with these requests. It isn’t possible to fit everything in, so test items are prioritised. The critical ones are addressed during testing, the rest are carried over to do when there is free time in free practice during the racing season. Some of the lowest priority items may still be on that list at the final race of the year.

Getting Those Final Testing Laps In

Beyond The Car

It’s important to note that not everything at a pre-season test is centred on the car and driver. Over the winter it’s common for the garage and pit equipment to receive an overhaul. There will be new kit and there will be new procedures. While there’s plenty of practice at the factory, it’s not really a substitute to doing it live and with a hot car. Thus, the tests are a useful opportunity for the trackside team to familiarise themselves and iron-out any problems.

There’s also a chance to work-up a rusty pit crew. Again, practice with the dummy kit in the factory is extremely useful but it isn’t quite the same as having the real driver hammer into the box driving the real car. During a normal pre-season, you would want to do plenty of these practice stops, and you’ll see teams run though a sequence of having their driver stop every lap for half an hour. This is also a good example of how the team has to multi-task during test sessions.

On the one hand the driver is working with the crew and the sporting director to nail the pit stop; on the other he’s also running through a launch programme with his engineering team, doing burnouts and working on his clutch release – and given how important a good launch off the grid is in F1, this is something that you can never practice enough times.

The Eye Of The Bull

Not like Fridays

This sort of practice isn’t particularly different to what you might do during Fridays at a grand prix – the only difference is that you have time to do more of it. Other items in the testing plan, however, can only be done at a test because they would consume too much time in a 60-minute session.

Completing a double race distance is a very good day at a test track but when you consider that’s spread out over nine hours, you can see that there’s a lot of time in the garage making changes, and some of those are the sort of things that you wouldn’t countenance doing on a race weekend.

Teams will spend the early part of the testing cycle doing longer stints to understand the fundamentals of their package. Once they’re happy with that, they’ll switch to doing shorter, more performance-oriented runs, spending more time performing set-up changes designed to extract the maximum from the package they have.

Heading into 2024's test there is one thing we can ensure, there's going to be a lot of attention on day one at Bahrain as teams get set to show their new challengers and truly show what technical innovations each team has decided to proceed with.

Excited to see the RB20 out on track this year? Join The Paddock to get even more closer to the team.

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