By the numbers: How the teams fared in Barcelona testing

The first three days of track time of 2022 are complete after all ten teams took part in the pre-season shakedown test at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain this week.

It's the first opportunity that we've had to see this year's cars in action, and while it's early says it's still fascinating to see which teams are doing well and which are already playing catch-up.

Looking at the data acquired over this week's sessions, the headline metric that grabs everyone's attention is inevitably who was fastest. So let's start with the top ten quickest drivers of the week:

Barcelona Pre-Season Test - Top ten fastest laps

Friday was obviously the day for going fastest, with Mercedes pair Lewis Hamilton and George Russell springing to the top of the timesheets. That was after a relatively slow start to proceedings on Wednesday and Thursday as they went through their development programme rather than going for quick laps.

Even so, the speeds at this point are significantly slower than those seen last season when Hamilton won pole position for the Spanish Grand Prix at the circuit with a time of 1:16.741s.

It's probably no surprise to see Red Bull next on the list, but there might be some raised eyebrows that it's Sergio Perez in the car while Max Verstappen was only sixth quickest for the week.

McLaren were also looking quick, with Lando Norris's afternoon time on the opening day proving good enough for fourth, while Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc's Thursday-topping time proved to be the fifth fastest lap overall.

However times can be deceptive at this stage as teams are less interested in speed as they are in ensuring basic reliability. So a better judge of how everyone is doing is the lap count over all three days.

Barcelona Pre-Season Test - Driver lap/km count

Given the extent of change in this year's introduction of new rules and regulations - including the reintroduction of ground effect downforce - it was feared that the week would see one mechanical breakdown after another as engineers hunted down a legion of gremlins.

But that didn't prove to be the case, with the first sessions on Wednesday proving surprisingly trouble-free with no red flags whatsoever. Verstappen pumped in a remarkable 147 laps on that day alone, although he stepped aside on Thursday and shared time in the car with Perez on Friday.

As a result he ended up with a total of 206 laps in the books over the three days - an impressive tally but only the fifth highest in the overall figures. Instead it was Carlos Sainz who put in the most miles with 236 completed laps, two dozen more than the next-best who was McLaren's Daniel Ricciardo.

However, with drivers swapping in and out over the three days it's not so straightforward to work out which car was the most reliable until we look at the total lap count by team.

Barcelona Pre-Season Test - Lap count by team

Sainz' hard work means that Ferrari ended up on top with 439 laps completed by the Spaniard and his Monegasque team mate Leclerc. That's 46 laps more in total than Mercedes, who nonetheless themselves still put in 26 laps more than McLaren after which things tighten up somewhat.

The total number of laps completed by all ten teams was 3126, which means that five ended up statistically below the average - AlphaTauri, Aston Martin, Alpine, Alfa Romeo and Haas.

In many cases the reason for the lack of mileage is apparent - Pierre Gasly's accident in the AlphaTauri for example, and Alpine's car fire stemming from a a minor sealing issue, which meant that both teams packed up early on Friday.

That's just the usual sort of thing to be expected in a first test of the season. More serious were the problems at Alfa Romeo and Haas in particular, with multiple reliability issues leaving them well behind the others - and off the pace as well.

Barcelona Pre-Season Test - Lap count by engine manufacturer

Finally, here's a cut and slice of the numbers by engine provider giving us another angle on the events of the week.

The engines have had to be extensively modified this season to take into account the switch to E10 fuel (consisting of ten per cent environmentally-friendly ethanol), described by Mercedes as the biggest change to the power units since the start of the modern turbo hybrid era in 2014.

With four teams using engines supplied by Mercedes, its no surprise to see who is on top. Similarly, Renault only power the Alpine team and completed the fewest laps, which may have a bearing on the amount of data and analysis they can gather to help guide their development.

We're going to gloss over the satanic significance of the total humber of laps completed by the legacy Honda power units run by Red Bull/AlphaTauri...

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