F1 rivals beware, Mercedes 'quicker day by day'

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Mercedes

F1 rivals beware, Mercedes 'quicker day by day'

Mercedes are looking like the team to beat so far

Sam Cook Digital Journalist

Sports Journalist who has been covering motorsport since 2023

Sunday 1 February 2026 17:55

Mercedes F1 chief Andrew Shovlin has issued an update on Mercedes' progress ahead of the 2026 season, and it's bad news for their rivals.

At the first pre-season testing event in Barcelona last week, Mercedes looked in good shape, putting in over 500 laps and sitting pretty at the top of the timesheets on two of their allocated three days of running.

New regulations are sweeping into the sport in 2026, and Mercedes have been rumoured for much of the winter to be best placed to master those regulations, but the talking stopped briefly last week as all of the teams finally showed off their 2026 machinery.

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Neither Russell nor Kimi Antonelli suffered any major reliability issues, while Russell's reported lap time of 1:16.445 was only beaten once throughout the week, by Lewis Hamilton on the final day. These lap times were not official, however, and had to be independently confirmed.

Now, Mercedes' trackside engineering director Shovlin has issued an update on how the Brackley-based outfit are shaping up, suggesting that they're getting 'quicker day-by-day'.

"It’s been really impressive from a reliability point of view," he told F1TV. "There’s all new systems on the car, it has worked brilliantly. We finished a day early, but part of that is the car has just let us run the programme day-by-day as we planned it.

"All of the areas that weren’t great on day one we’ve made good progress, so that’s very encouraging. And that progress is actually making us quicker day-by-day. Honestly, the reliability has just been amazing which is a huge testament to all of that work back at Brixworth and at Brackley, to bring this project together."

F1 testing moves on to Bahrain

Following the private shakedown in Barcelona, we are now getting set for two three-day testing events in Bahrain in February. These sessions are set to be much more representative of where each team is in the pecking order, and official lap times will be available.

The first of the three-day events takes place between February 11-13, while the other one is between February 18-20. This extended testing programme was put in place with the new regulation changes in mind, although all of the 10 teams that were present in Barcelona seemed to have pretty good reliability immediately.

Shovlin went on to talk about what Mercedes' plan would be for Bahrain, hinting that they are not far away from already being able to run race and qualifying programmes.

"For every event, we have an idea of what objectives we want to achieve, we’ve pretty much ticked all of those boxes for these two," he said. "Bahrain, we’re going to move more to setup exploration and trying to work out how you get the car in the right window. Whilst you can do set-up here [Barcelona], it’s so cold it’s not really relevant to any race track.

”Bahrain is going to be a much better place to check that the car runs well at temperature, both in terms of the chassis performance side, but just if the systems are running effectively. That final Bahrain will hopefully just be more about the race prep, preparing for qualifying, preparing for the race and all the situations that that throws up."