It’s a similar story at Ferrari, who were Red Bull’s closest competitors at the end of last season.
Three pole positions for Charles Leclerc in the final five races of 2023 were evidence that Ferrari had finally found a way to tame what had started the season as a wilful and vicious car, and made significant progress on performance too. Over the second half of last year, the Ferrari was on average just 0.032 seconds slower than the Red Bull over a qualifying lap.
Their focus over the winter has been on finding a better trade-off between qualifying and race, for even when the Ferrari could outpace the Red Bull over one lap, it would fade over a stint.
Team boss Frederic Vasseur said: “It is always a compromise, but over the [2023] season as a whole the global picture was we were competitive in qualifying and suffering more in the race. We had to focus on the fact the car had to be easier to drive.”
Leclerc said at the launch that the Ferrari simulator suggested the team had made “a significant step forward” on this. But the behaviour of these ground-effect cars with venturi underfloor tunnels is not always easy to simulate in the virtual world.
The paradox of last season was that while Red Bull set new standards in terms of dominance, they did so in a year in which the field spread from front to back was one of the smallest ever – just 1.4 seconds separated the fastest car from the slowest [the Alfa Romeo Sauber] on average in qualifying.
Alonso expects this to be the case again. “It will be very tight,” he says. “There are four or five teams within 0.2-0.3secs this year, I bet. That will put you within 0.2secs fighting for podiums or outside the top 10.”
And that is another reason why it will be so hard to work anything out about the true competitive picture from this week’s running. When margins are so tight, the effect of the inevitable variables of testing is even harder to unpick.
There will be no firm answers by the time testing finishes on Friday evening, only hints. And as the teams prepare for their cars’ first serious running, McLaren’s Lando Norris has probably summed up the situation best so far.
“Are Red Bull beatable?” Norris wondered last week. “You have to say yes, because we were very close at certain times and at certain times we did.
“But the question is: are they beatable over a season? I think that will be very difficult.”