Pre-season testing – Best lap times (days 1-6)

Time to do a quick recap of the best laps seen during the 2020 pre-season testing sessions.

Brief notice

If you hover over the bars (or click them if you’re using a mobile device), you will get additional information. In this case, sector times are presented to you.

Best times

Valtteri Bottas did the fastest lap of the pre-season testing days. His time of 1:15.732 was more than half a second faster than the second fastest time seen in the past two weeks. Interestingly, while Bottas also had the best second and third sectors, his first sector only ranked as 10th among the laps seen in this chart. Is there even more to come from Mercedes?

Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo were 2nd and 3rd in this ranking, both separated by only 7 thousands of a second. A strong performance by Red Bull puts them in strong position before the start of the new season.

There was much controversy surrounding Ferrari, and the reality is that we still do not know the full capabilities of their car. Charles Leclerc did the 4th fastest time of pre-season (1:16.359), and posted the 2nd fastest sector 2 of the laps shown. While his lap was 628 thousands of a second slower than Bottas’ fastest lap, I believe that there is more to come from the Scuderia.

Checo Pérez did the 7th fastest time of pre-season, and showed the speed of the new RP20. While Racing Point failed to impress in the 2nd and 3rd sectors (ranking in 9th and 10th position respectively), Checo registered the 2nd fastest first sector, while Lance Stroll posted the fastest first sector seen so far.

One of the big surprises of testing was Williams. While the rookie Nicholas Latifi only managed to do the 17th fastest lap of testing, George Russell strongly positioned his FW43 in 10th place. The British driver showed strong pace in the first and second sector, but failed to impress in the third and final sector of the track. Still, a marvelous turnaround compared to last year’s testing days.

On the negative side, Kevin Magnussen struggled with reliability, and Haas as a team failed to show improvement compared to last year. Hopefully the American team still has some trick in the bag, or it will be another difficult start to the season for them.

Final remarks

This was just the first recap of the pre-season testing days. I will be making more articles in the next few days, before ending with a final recap adding all the info into a single article.

I hope that you have enjoyed this article. If you did, please share it with your friends and let me know what you think in the comments below.