F1 pre-season testing: Six big 2022 questions to be answered in Barcelona

After a winter dominated by controversy over the 2021 season finale at Abu Dhabi, a new era of Formula 1 racing finally gets underway on Wednesday as pre-testing begins in Barcelona.

The 2022 campaign kicks off with a preliminary group test as all ten teams head to the Circuit de Catalunya, fresh off the shortest off-season in F1 history.

Despite its peculiar billing as a mere ‘shakedown’, this is a pre-season test in all but name, with teams engaging in three days’ worth of running across Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Each squad will run one car in Barcelona, with drivers splitting their time in the cockpit with their respective team-mates.

This will be the first time the 2022 machinery will be driven in anger, following the enormous regulation which change came into effect over the winter and has seen every team forced to build their car from the ground up. The new regulations are designed to encourage harder racing and could see the grid order shaken up after a few seasons of stagnation.

Though some media will be able to attend the Barcelona test, the event will not be broadcast live, so fans will only be able to follow the action and glean information via photography and reports. That doesn’t meant that we won’t learn plenty, though, before the second formal test takes place in Bahrain on 10-12 March.

These are six big questions we could find out answers to from this week’s test.

Can cars really follow each other more closely?

The regulation change has primarily been devised in order to allow F1 cars to follow one another more closely.

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