F1 Explained: What are aero rakes and why are they crucial during pre-season testing?

Pre-season testing is back, but while it may just seem an exercise in Formula 1 cars touring endlessly around the desert in Bahrain - there are plenty of questions!

Will Ferrari produce a car good enough to give Lewis Hamilton a chance to fight for the drivers' title? Can Max Verstappen win a record equalling fifth consecutive world championship? We get our first clues on that over three days before lights out at the season opening Australian Grand Prix.

READ MORE: F1 2025 Driver Lineup: Big names on the move as full grid complete

However some questions are a lot more immediate - and are unique to the environments of testing around the Sakhir Circuit.

One of those concern the huge metal fences seen near the front of the cars that you will rarely see during a grand prix season but are constant testing, otherwise known as aero rakes.

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What are aero rakes and why are they important?

Aero rakes resemble metal fences that are mounted on the car. The aero rakes consist of sensors that can measure pressure and temperature, for example, but can also measure how the airflow flows from, for example, the tyres or the front wing.

Teams can compare data from the wind tunnel with data from the aero rakes to come up with a better aerodynamic setup for a particular circuit.

From the data from the aero rakes, teams can see how different settings change the car's performance.

In this way it can be determined whether, for example, the front wing needs to be adjusted a little for more downforce.

Former Ferrari engineer Rob Smedley explained to F1: "[The] information then goes back to the aerodynamics team, and they can then use that data in order to then optimise and improve the upstream flow structure generation.

"The data that comes back from the aero rakes is very quick – it’s almost real-time. Teams have developed software that takes the raw data and spits out these really interesting images and video files.

"Some of the stuff, you can act on immediately. So if you’re doing a ‘front wing polar’, for example, which means stepping through from a low angle up to the maximum angle of the front wing, then we’re able to see if that front polar is healthy. Or we can see if there’s a point where the front wing ‘falls over’, as we term it, where we’re not generating the downforce on the front anymore. You might be getting a stall or a semi-stall, and at that point, the information from the aero rakes is telling the race engineers to stay away from that area of running the car.

"Equally, there are sometimes more fundamental things that we pick up from the aero rakes that we can’t solve at the track, and that then goes back to the aerodynamics team and they can deliberate on how to solve these fundamental problems and to put these flow structures in a more optimised position."

How to watch F1 pre-season testing on TV

Coverage of F1 pre-season testing from the Bahrain International Circuit will be live on Sky Sports and Sky Go in the UK.

Broadcast details vary depending on your location. Please check below to see how you can catch the action.

F1 TV Pro subscribers can also tune in for pre-season testing in select regions.

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