This in a nutshell! Times are utterly meaningless in testing, I'd say final practice in melbourne is when I'll start taking times a little more seriously.
I think people are getting a touch too sensitive and also discounting how different testing will be this year to last year.
First times aren't meaningless, if Hamilton went and did a 2 second faster than pole last year lap... I don't think that would be meaningless would it
Second, last year the teams knew the engines completely, they knew how much speed they'd gain from say turning the engines up to 100% from 85% so the need to do so wasn't really there. They also importantly knew the engines would have no trouble running at 100%. We've got completely new engines, at some stage ALL the teams will need to test at least a one stint simulation at full engine power simply to check the car can do it.
I think testing this year will show much closer to real pace than the past 3 years. Maybe in the last 2 days of this test, for some teams only at the next test.
This year if there is any issue with running the car maxed out, they need longer than between P3 and Q1 to fix something huge, last year, it was never going to be an issue.
There is also simply the drivers getting used to it. We've seen seemingly one driver struggle quite badly getting used to the new torque available and spinning his car a couple of times. Again last year there was nothing new the drivers didn't know, add more revs and more power and the drivers need to learn how the cars feel at max power before racing starts.
Seriously though, Bottas has done 45 laps without setting a time? Is this taking Sandbagging to a level even RBR aren't familiar with?
