2024 F1 pre-season test Day 1: What did we learn?

The 2024 F1 pre-season test's first day of running is done and dusted. There is always quite a lot of intrigue when it comes to the first time the cars take the track. Fortunately for all of them, there weren't too many stoppages as almost every team was able to complete decent mileage and get their respective campaigns underway.

The 2024 F1 season, however, has begun in a manner that the 2023 season ended, with Max Verstappen's Red Bull leading the charts. After an eye-watering gap of close to a second, we had Lando Norris in his McLaren in P2, followed by Carlos Sainz in P3.

With the first day of running now in the rearview mirror, let's take a look at what we learned.

2024 F1 pre-season test Day 1: Key takeaways

#1 Red Bull and Max Verstappen just took things up a notch

For a moment, even if we keep the times aside, Red Bull looks a million bucks on the track. You compare that car to any other car on the grid and you can tell this is the one that has everything hooked up.

It's almost hilarious to see everyone copying Red Bull's homework from last season and then the team turns up with a different concept this year. Every other car in F1 looks nothing like the RB20 and that car looks stunningly fast already.

Ominous signs for everyone not supporting Max Verstappen or Red Bull this season.

#2 The chasing pack might be too far behind

If we ignore Red Bull from the F1 pre-season test, we might be looking at the most competitive test in a long time. Ferrari looks good, Mercedes had a very impressive long run, McLaren was quietly confident in its approach while Aston Martin started the day impressively.

You take all of that into consideration and you have four teams that might be very close to each other in terms of performance. Unfortunately, neither looks anywhere close to as impressive as Red Bull. The first qualifying session in Bahrain and the race would be observed for only one thing by the looks of it, to find out how far behind these teams are from the Austrian squad.

Good, but not good enough, seems to be the takeaway at the moment.

#3 Williams, Alpine and Haas appear to have regressed

Alpine and Haas had already admitted that the teams were bracing for a slower start to the season.

When analyzing Nico Hulkenberg's long runs, it's evident that his times were significantly slower compared to George Russell in Mercedes. Similarly, Esteban Ocon's performance lagged far behind. This suggests that both teams may need to invest considerable effort before reaching a competitive level.

#4 RB is going to turn a few heads this season

The timesheets point at a competitive car from the Faenza-based squad and it looked even more impressive in the hands of Daniel Ricciardo later in the day. One thing, however, that the timesheets do not capture is how impressive that car looked on track.

The association between the parent team and the sister team has grown and we might see RB turn a few heads this season. Zak Brown, for one, might not be a happy man after Bahrain.

#5 A question about these regulations

This set of F1 regulations was supposed to be the end of single-team dominance. Can we truly claim that something like that has even happened? We're looking at a scenario where all three seasons in these regulations will have single-team dominance.

All of this is despite a rolling scale development time and a prescriptive regulation. At some point, teams and fans would question why these regulations were not as advertised.