Mercedes technical director James Allison arrived in Barcelona last week bracing for chaos – and instead found calm.
In a pre-season environment packed with brand-new machinery and untested technology, the veteran engineer admits he was expecting smoke, stoppages and a sea of red flags. What he got instead was something far more encouraging: cars that just kept going.
For a sport stepping into one of its biggest technical resets in decades, the early signs were unexpectedly reassuring.
The 2026 Formula 1 season has ushered in a dramatic rules overhaul: lighter and smaller cars, active aerodynamics and an all-new power unit formula splitting energy evenly between internal combustion and electric power.
On paper, it sounded like the perfect recipe for mechanical gremlins and frantic garage repairs.
Last week’s shakedown at the Circuit de Catalunya was designed to give teams an early taste of reality before the official Bahrain test later in February.
A Pleasant Shock in the Pit Lane
Allison, reflecting during Mercedes’ live launch event on Monday, admitted he went in fully prepared for disruption.
"I think the biggest thing that surprised us, and I'm guessing it's true also for our competitors, has been the really quite astonishing level of reliability that we've seen up and down the grid," Allison explained.
"With everything new as it is, I think it would have been reasonable to expect this first shakedown test to have been just a symphony of red flags and smoking vehicles, but that really hasn't happened.
©Mercedes
"And in fact, for the most part, the reliability of these cars has been absolutely comparable, in some cases, better than last year's winter testing, with things that were far more mature, and which were very well understood.
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"So that has definitely been a surprise to us, a welcome surprise, and I hope something that means that we can go into the new season, just concentrating on the racing, rather than trying to keep everything held together with baling wire and sticking tape."
For teams accustomed to early-season firefighting, the tone was almost celebratory. Instead of scrambling to fix failures, engineers were able to focus on performance — a luxury rarely afforded in the opening weeks of a new technical era.
Eyes on the Opposition
Reliability wasn’t the only attraction in Barcelona. The shakedown also marked the first real opportunity for teams to peek behind the curtain and size up rival designs after months spent developing in isolation.
Allison didn’t pretend otherwise.
"Well, intensely, of course," Allison said when asked how interested he was in the other teams.
"Everybody spends the whole of the year or so it takes to design and build these cars, working in a vacuum, absolutely focused on what you're doing, intensely caring about putting as much performance as you possibly can into those cars.
"But knowing that up and down the land and abroad as well, there are other groups doing exactly the same, wrestling with the same challenge, and thinking about it probably differently to the way we are. And so when we do all emerge into the light, we just fall upon their designs to try to see what they may have found that we may have missed.
"And we take as many photos as we can, and then if we see something that is tricky to understand, we will put people on it until they do. If we see something that we think, 'Oh, crikey, we should have thought of that', then we'll start working on that as fast as we can.
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"And just overall, we are completely shameless plagiarists, and the reason we're shameless is that we know all of our competitors are exactly the same.
“Part of the sport is doing what you can with the skills you have on your own. And then when you all come together, then working out what other people have done and trying to learn from them as well."
It’s classic Formula 1 candour – part competition, part collaboration, and entirely unapologetic. In a championship built on innovation, imitation is not just flattery; it’s survival.
With Bahrain testing looming and the Australian Grand Prix set to launch the season in early March, Allison’s upbeat takeaway from Barcelona offers a rare early-year gift: optimism.
The new era may still hold surprises, but at least for now, the cars are running – and that alone has engineers smiling.
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