Given Ferrari had been tipped to be McLaren's main threat in the 2025 Formula 1 season, how it fared in Bahrain testing may have left some wanting.
From an encouraging first day where Charles Leclerc seemed to be quite at ease with the new SF-25, the subsequent two days of running gave the impression of there being a gap between Ferrari and McLaren.
In fact, based on Lando Norris's astonishing long run on the second evening that put him 30 seconds up the road in a like-for-like comparison with Leclerc, indications point to Ferrari not only being behind but also facing a potential extra threat from the improved Mercedes.
Leclerc's Thursday run was almost neck-and-neck with Kimi Antonelli – who was completing his first ever race run on actual F1 tyres, so clearly has room to do even better as he gets to grips with things.
But in trying to evaluate how things shook out this week between McLaren and Ferrari, there is one caveat on reading too much into long-run form: it's testing and not racing.
That means you can never be sure that you are comparing apples with apples when looking across different teams. Varying fuel loads, and different engine modes, can drastically paint the wrong impression when trying to compare cars.
And Bahrain this year was even worse for offering clarity because unprecedented cold weather and gusts of wind meant conditions varied all the time.
Cool and relatively calm on the first day, it was colder with occasional rain on the second day before the final day was warmer and windier. So where the SF-25 was settled at first, it never got itself back in its initial happy place.
As Leclerc said: "The feeling on the first day was good, then on the second and third day the conditions became a lot more difficult, so it was quite trickier.
"Now we're just trying to put the balance back in the right window, which is where our focus is at the moment. So there's a bit of work in order to have the right feeling with the balance still."
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The unusual weather also meant that there was potential for some unrealistic conclusions to be reached too, because Bahrain's conditions were a world away from how it will when it comes to the actual race weekend in April.
That is why McLaren was not getting too excited by the numbers that Norris's Thursday run indicated compared to what Leclerc and Antonelli had done, because the weather meant some of its historic weaknesses at the Sakhir track were potentially masked.
Yet the long runs that day remain the best evidence we have of a direct head-to-head between McLaren and Ferrari, which is why Leclerc did pay some attention to it – even if he is aware it may not be the total reality.
"As much as testing is all about focusing on ourselves, whenever there's a race run you always look a little bit of what the others are doing," he said.
"But we don't know in which conditions they're running.
"It's a first glimpse of what we can expect but there are lots of unknowns still. So we need to take this with a pinch of salt.
"However it was a really important run to understand where we were lacking compared to them but also compared to my own feeling.
"As I've been saying quite a few times, we still have quite a bit of work to be done to be ready for Melbourne."
Bahrain testing has certainly left us an impression, but not a confirmation, that Ferrari seems to be behind McLaren right now. What we cannot be sure of is just how big that gap is.
Finding an answer was also made harder when a planned race simulation for Lewis Hamilton on the final day did not get completed as he got in just a 12-lap stint before stopping in the garage because an "anomaly" had been spotted on Ferrari's data. That run would have given us a direct comparison with efforts from Oscar Piastri and George Russell.
What we do know though is that Ferrari is certainly not pretending it was a perfect test, and it has an optimum baseline to attack the start of the season.
As Leclerc reflected on how things had gone on the final day, he suggested that the balance was not yet in a place where the team could have confidence it has got things as nailed as it wanted.
"The feeling is that we have some work to be done on the balance of the car before we get it exactly right," he said.
"We're not yet in the right window, which is normal because in testing you try different things, and you have to do quite big changes in order to swap all the different set-up directions, to make sure you make the right choice coming into the first race.
"That's what testing is for. So that's what we've done. Yesterday [Thursday] we were a bit extreme on one side, today we'll try other things. All in all, it's about trying and testing every different direction and making sure we're sure of the right one after this test."
The SF-25 does not appear to have any huge vices – and Hamilton has talked of it offering a positive foundation and putting him in a happier place than he has felt for quite a while at this stage of the pre-season.
However, even he admits there is work to be done based on what Norris was able to unleash.
"It's hard to know what fuel loads everyone is running, as we're all doing different our own programmes - you have to take everything with a pinch of salt," Hamilton said about that McLaren form.
"But they won the constructors' last year, so we expect them to be one of the quickest, if not the quickest, as with Red Bull, who dominated for many, many years. So, for us, we're just trying to improve…We've definitely got some work to do to improve."
While the number crunching over the next few days will produce some clearer indications about how things stack up across the field, from Ferrari's perspective little time will be wasted on getting its own team ranking in place.
Instead, ahead of the season opener in Melbourne, on a vastly different track configuration and surface to what we had this week, all that matters is making sure it is the best position it can be.
Team boss Fred Vasseur said: "We have no clue about the pace. We know the level of fuel that we have in the car. We know the engine mode, but we don't know about the others.
"We can do tonnes of speculation but if you take the first session [of last year's test], Verstappen was one second faster than us, and it was not the [story of the] season. But honestly this, I think it's speculation and a loss of time.
"We just have to be focused on us, to check that we have the numbers of aero we were expecting, the balance of the car that we are expecting. Then, I trust my guys."
