Welcome Drivers!

As you may know we are exactly one week away from pre-season testing getting underway in Bahrain on the 23rd. Teams have been ramping up with both their car launches and shakedowns (with some teams doing both at the same time). We are here to walk through the best and worst moments of the week and touch on some trending topics across Formula 1.

News Around the Paddock

Before we get into the car reveals lets go through some of the headline news in F1:

• McLaren & Honda have made initial contact about reuniting for the 2026 regulation changes

• After the Red Bull-Ford partnership announcement, Ford has come out saying that they will not be able to spend “unlimited” amounts of money in the new partnership and suggested they will be “racing in a responsible way”

• Las Vegas has approved plans for the Grand Prix to take place there for 10 more years

• Lando Norris has reaffirmed his commitment to McLaren and has maintained he is patient for a rebuild

• Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna has come out and said the SF23 will be unprecedented in terms of speed

• Christian Horner has said that a surprise contender this year could be Aston Martin as they keep hearing “big numbers” in their expectations

• Sergio Perez has insisted that the presence of Daniel Ricciardo at Red Bull does not add any extra pressure to perform for the Mexican driver

• Lewis Hamilton, Lando Norris and several other drivers have spoke on the FIA rules regarding their freedom of speech saying they feel like they should be able to say what they want

• Toto Wolff said that the W14 bodywork would be upgraded early in the season

• There were rumors that Mercedes has issues in their 15km shakedown runs at Silverstone

Car Reveals

At this point all of the teams have either done their launch or snippets of their shakedowns have been leaked to the public. There were some very exciting launches (Ferrari), some very dull launches (Aston Martin) and some just downright bad launches (AlphaTauri). We will go through who we thought did the best job and who we thought did the worst job of all the F1 launches this year.

The Best Launch

The P1 of car launches goes to Ferrari this year. Rather than doing a very corporate reveal with the car on stage in an auditorium, Ferrari took the SF23 and their drivers out to the track to run a small program and show off the new details of the car. This was a refreshing sight as every other launch was a drawn out ordeal and each one felt the exact same as the last.

Unlike other teams that preferred to keep their shakedowns private, Ferrari invited both media and the Tifosi to the launch. They ran a 15km demonstration run for everyone who showed up. Ferrari let both Leclerc and Sainz get on the track in the demonstration and both were very happy with how the car felt.

This should be the way teams launch cars going forward. Enough with the secrecy and discretion, just let it rip! Beats the heck out of waiting 45 minutes on a live stream just to see a tarp slowly pulled off a car with the exact same livery as last year.

The Best Livery

Mercedes is going back to black and the W14 looks great. Given the success the team had in 2020 and 2021 in the black livery, they likely felt like the change was necessary after a unusual off year for Mercedes in 2022. The W14 just looks sleek and with the yellow/green number accents it makes the car pop.

Mercedes was the only team to have major changes to their livery as most other teams kept the same color scheme and only added minor changes from last year’s cars.

The Worst Launch

We have to give this to AlphaTauri. We know what they were trying to do with fashion week going on in NY at the same time as the launch but the whole thing felt awkward. Yuki Tsunoda and Nick De Vries just looked out of place and it felt like AlphaTauri was more focused on promoting their brand rather than revealing the car. These are just our opinions, we are sure some people enjoyed the launch but it was not for us.

At a minimum, AlphaTauri should emphasize the car more in future launches. Just didn’t feel like a Formula 1 event at the end of the day. The launch was also in the afternoon in NY, making it a very late launch for their European fans. They should try to select times that are better for their primary fanbase.

The Worst Livery

Not the worst livery but the most disappointing in our opinion was Red Bull. Once again the defending champions did next to nothing on changing their livery. At least other teams changed some of the accents and colors hear and there. We are pretty sure Red Bull may have done nothing. But hey, if they keep winning championships then their livery really doesn’t matter right. Red Bull will keep using their standard livery.

On a more interesting note, Red Bull did announce that they will use fan designed liveries for the US races this season. This is a unique concept and will be a fun way to engage fans. We are excited to see how that turns out but think the current livery has gone very stale.

Honorable Mentions

Aston Martin probably had one of the more boring launches this season. The whole launch stream felt very corporate and none of the audience seemed overly excited about the car itself. This team has been very confident about their car this year but it definitely did not seem like it at the launch.

Leading up to the actual reveal Lawrence Stroll and others got up and spoke for far too long. In the future, they should do this once they have already revealed the car. It was painful to sit there and watch men in suits talk about the direction the team is going in a very scripted manner.

Fernando Alonso lightened the mood by practically skipping down the runway when being brought out to the reveal but other than that it was pretty unnoteworthy.

Upcoming Posts and Reader Feedback

Our next post we will get back to the constructor deep dives into each team for their 2023 outlook. We will try to get out one a day considering we have limited time before the pre-season testing starts in late February.

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