“I did not expect this to occur,” Joylon Palmer gives initial thoughts on Barcelona pre-season testing

Day 1 of the pre-season testing in Barcelona finally came to an end with all the 10 teams testing their 2022 challenger on Wednesday during a four-hour morning and afternoon sessions. Jolyon Palmer, commentator and columnist had gotten a chance to look over the cars and analyse their performance at various turns. Towards the end of the day, Jolyon analyses and reflects on the biggest learnings from day one at Circuit de Barcelona Catalunya.

The one thing that stood out was the “reliability” of the new era cars. The 2022 challengers were incredible and it was amazing to see them on track. The session had a brief red flag with all the eight teams finishing with at least 100 laps leaving the Alpha Romeo and Hass teams who suffered with few problems. “I did not expect this to occur on Day One,” said Palmer.

With the teams already starting to rise at the top, Jolyon had the opportunity to go see few of the faster corners and was impressed by the speed at which the cars were moving even if they lost a couple of seconds of performance compared to the higher down force last year. Charles Leclerc in the ferrari flat out really early on through turn 9 which was really very impressive with Lando Norris’ perfect positioning of the car leading him to top the timing at turn 7 were few of the performances that stood out in today’s testing.

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Joylon Palmer expects a lot of debriefing from F1 teams

Mercedes was looking good, however towards the turn 1, “you could see certain bouncing down at the end of the straight which might give them a headache,” said Palmer. Mercedes seemed to be slightly on the back foot today which was previously followed by a short filming day at Silverstone due to the wet track. Compared to them, other teams have had fairly successful filming days which might have been the reason leading to their problem today.

When asked about his thoughts on the to-do list of the driver’s over-night, Jolyon said, there will be a “lot of debriefing, way more than they would have anticipated. So many laps were covered today, with 153 laps covered by Ferrari across the two drivers, so both have got a lot to debrief. Every run is meticulously planned.”

The teams will get back to testing on February 24, Friday for day two with drivers checking the reliability, pace and practicing on various corners and overtakes ahead of the official practice day.

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