10 of F1's most unusual testing tales

Perhaps the biggest surprise to come in F1 testing in recent years was Brawn’s showing in 2009. Rising from the ashes following Honda’s pull-out at the end of 2008, simply reaching testing was considered a major achievement from Brawn. The fact that Jenson Button was then able to dominate proceedings took everyone by immense surprise, leading comfortably with the benefit of its game-changing double-diffuser. Wary of tactics from the likes of Prost in the past (see below), there was an element of scepticism that such searing pace would linger until the season began - but it did. Button won six of the first seven races en route to a championship double for Brawn, which was then snapped up by Mercedes. The rest is history…

When you’re struggling to stay afloat at the back of the grid in Formula 1, a miraculous pre-season turnaround is the kind of thing dreams are made of. Such a revival looked to have been made by the Prost team in 2001 when it debuted the AP04 car in pre-season testing, with Jean Alesi lighting up the timing screens on a regular basis. However, such prospects faded come the start of the year in Melbourne when Alesi qualified three seconds off the pole time, leading to suggestions that the car had been run outside of the regulations in pre-season in a bid to attract sponsors. Prost scored just four points through 2001 and folded at the end of the year.

When Honda announced it would be returning to F1 in 2015 and reviving its esteemed partnership with McLaren, hopes were not only high many were predicting wins and even titles. It served to make the reality all the more painful for McLaren when pre-season testing quickly dismissed those expectations as very far off the mark. Persistent power unit problems saw it complete just 79 fairly average pace laps in the opening test at Jerez - by comparison, Mercedes-powered cars did 983. While progress was made in 2016, issues remain to this very day, making the glory days of Senna and Prost seem ever so far away.

In a time long before we spent the winter asking whether or not McLaren would be running in an orange livery, the British team opted to go back to its papaya roots for testing. Bruce McLaren’s team ran in orange for much of its early life before taking on the white and chrome look under Ron Dennis. Papaya was revived for pre-season testing in 1997 when Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard tested the McLaren MP4/12 at Jerez before reverting back to the team’s usual silver and black colours for the season. The team did the same thing in 2006, putting the MP4-21 in orange for testing before eventually making it the primary car colour for 2017.

Never a team to shy away from standing out from the crowd, Red Bull debuted this radical look for testing in Jerez, taking inspiration from Sebastian Vettel’s helmet design for the Italian Grand Prix the previous year. Running in black and white camouflage is common the car world as manufacturers attempt to disguise their designs and innovations, but this was a first for F1. As it happens, the look didn’t make the RB11 harder to analyse or photograph (unlike the amount of time it spent off the track anyway because of reliability issues), but was certainly novel, and gave the team more time to decide on its final race livery that was unveiled one month later... looking almost the same as it did in 2014 anyway!

A legend of the two-wheel world and especially in his native Italy, Valentino Rossi has made a few forays into four-wheel action over the years but it is his tests with Ferrari that generate immense fever amongst his loyal legion of fans. Having previously conducted private tests for Ferrari, the team invited him to join the other F1 drivers for an outing at Valencia in 2006, kick-starting a flurry of rumours. Despite suffering a spin and a stall on the first day, Rossi was soon up to speed and proved competitive against rivals in terms of lap times, suggesting his notorious skills could have potentially transferred if given the opportunity. Legend has it that 'the Doctor' had an option to race for Ferrari in 2007, but decided to stick to two wheels in MotoGP.

Rossi isn’t the only MotoGP champion to have also tried his hand in an F1 car. Jorge Lorenzo followed in the footsteps of his former team-mate and bitter rival last year when he was given the chance to take part in a private test with Mercedes at Silverstone. Lorenzo completed a run in the world championship-winning Mercedes W05 Hybrid from 2014, and called the test “a dream come true”. The Spaniard impressed Mercedes’ engineers, but shows few signs of looking to cross codes anytime soon, having recently joined Ducati’s factory MotoGP operation for 2017.

F1 has produced a number of weird and wonderful aerodynamic solutions over the years, but one of the stranger interpretations to appear in pre-season testing was Williams’ ‘walrus’ nose in 2004. The FW26 featured a unique solution to the front-end design, aiming to push more air to the underside of the car. A rough start to the season followed, with Williams chalking up more disqualifications than podiums in the first half of the campaign. For Hungary, a significant redesign of the car was pushed through, with the walrus nose being ditched in favour of a more traditional design. Williams went on to win the final race of the year in Brazil with Juan Pablo Montoya.

Fernando Alonso's Spanish shunt is one of the stranger tales to come out of F1 testing in recent years... and one that still poses questions. Whilst testing for McLaren in Barcelona two years ago, Alonso crashed at Turn 3, with the size of the shunt resulting in a visit to hospital. Alonso was kept in overnight, allegedly as a precaution, and the crash was blamed on a gust of wind. But more details gradually came out. McLaren chief Ron Dennis initially said Alonso was concussed, only to later clarify that this was not that case and that he was instead briefly knocked unconscious. Conspiracy theories were banded about as Alonso was forced to miss the final pre-season test and the first race of the year, but he eventually returned for the Malaysian Grand Prix - where he duly said that he had suffered a concussion. Becoming folklore in the F1 paddock (in other words, something of a joke) and coming at a particularly sensitive time for McLaren and new partners Honda, we wait for the day when we get a clear version of what actually happened.

The past few days have been rough for F1 rookie Lance Stroll. Despite being given more preparation than any debutant in the last decade of racing by virtue of a remarkably extensive private test programme, 18-year-old Stroll suffered a spin during his first run in the 2017-spec Williams FW40 on Tuesday, damaging the car. A lack of spares meant the team had to end its running, with Stroll being given time on Wednesday to make up the lost time. Stroll completed 98 laps, but his outing was blighted by two off-track excursions, the latter being a crash that once caused damage to the car. It forced Williams to end its test appearance a day early, and raised early concerns in the paddock about Stroll’s suitability for an F1 seat. Somewhat harshly, it also yielded hasstrollcrashedyet.com, the follow-up to hasmaldonadocrashedtoday.com. The step up from F3 to F1 is big, particularly in 2017 - so the jury should not be out on Stroll just yer. Nevertheless, early struggles after completing nearly four year’s worth of grand prix distances privately isn’t the best first impression for Stroll to make.