The 2023 Formula 1 season is just a few days away, with the Bahrain Grand Prix kicking off a record-breaking year with 23 races deciding the outcome of the world championship.
It remains to be seen exactly how competitive each of the teams will be. Pre-season testing offered some insight, but it is only when the cars take to the Sakhir track for practice and qualifying this coming weekend that the true balance of power will begin to become apparent.
Still, many top F1 pundits and journalists feel they saw enough during testing to have a stab at how they think the teams will stack up at the Bahrain GP. And there will be little surprise about who pretty much everyone thinks is the early-season favourite.
Red Bull looked imperious again during the three-day test. While they were beaten to the top of the timesheets in some sessions by smaller teams completing glory runs on softer tyre compounds, they showed consistently that they had more pace than anyone else with the RB19.
Ferrari were the closest challengers last year and it seems that will be the case again at the start of the new season. The Scuderia struggled with tyre degradation again – a problem which plagued the Italians in 2022 – but other than that appear to have another very competitive machine in the SF-23.
One of the real surprises is that many have picked Aston Martin for the third quickest team rather than Mercedes. Drive to Survive narrator Will Buxton and F1 technical expert Albert Fabrega are among those who feel Fernando Alonso might have a quicker car than Lewis Hamilton in the race this weekend.
Not everyone feels that way – Buxton's F1 colleague Lawrence Barretto thinks the Silver Arrows will still be in the top three teams, while Martin Brundle rubbished his Sky Sports colleague Ted Kravitz's belief that Aston Martin could be quicker than Mercedes.
Outside the top four, the consensus is that Alpine will be next best with Alfa Romeo and Haas potentially scrapping for points as well. But most share the opinion that McLaren will likely be out of contention for a top 10 finish given the papaya team's poor performance in testing.
Buxton and Barretto even went as far as to estimate that McLaren might have the slowest car on the grid, ranking them rock-bottom even below Williams and AlphaTauri. Fabrega was one of very few who feels the Woking outfit has a car that is not in the bottom three in terms of performance, though he could only see them being the seventh most competitive in Bahrain.
